


geocentricity_vs_celestial_navigation

by Heavenward (PreludeInZ)



Series: Heavenward [4]
Category: Thunderbirds
Genre: Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-01-06
Updated: 2016-01-06
Packaged: 2018-05-10 23:49:14
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 16
Words: 31,519
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/5605657
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/PreludeInZ/pseuds/Heavenward
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Heavenward is a story about John and EOS. From rather humble beginnings on the subject of malaria in space, the story has progressed through a hospital in Zurich, a talkshow in London, and an office in Auckland. Onward and upward.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. prologue

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> [art via mindofmachine.tumblr.com](http://mindofmachine.tumblr.com/post/131593742571/hi-there-i-have-become-pretty-strapped-for)

 

 

Earth is not the center of the universe. It’s not the center of the galaxy, nor is it the center of the solar system. Human conventions for measuring the relevance of their tiny speck of a planet against the vastness of all creation are grandiose and generally inaccurate.

Still, geocentricity has its uses. Ptolemy propounded the model that proposes Earth at the center of a celestial sphere, and from this premise, the movements of the heavens can be used to measure movements across the Earth. Calculations of altitude and azimuth require the flawed conviction that the Earth is the fixed point around which the heavens follow regular, reliable circular paths.

A usable, useful model can be founded on incorrect premise. An illogical course of action can achieve a desired result. All models are wrong, but some models are useful.

John’s not a philosopher. Far from it—he’s always been juxtaposed against the humanities like a zero beside a one. Still, he’s had reason recently to familiarize himself with models of consciousness, and these are as flawed and varied as the span of astronomical theories from Heraclides to Copernicus.

So screw it. EOS is real and her existence is as valid as he wants it to be, as valid as is useful and serves his purpose. If he has to be Galileo instead of Kepler where the question of celestial mechanics compared to the question of complex AI is concerned, then so be it. But he’ll take exile over arrest. And he’ll be damned if he goes it alone.


	2. something half-remembered

“You said I’d know when to look for you.” John puts an emptied glass back on the table in front of him, the last barrier between him and the Hood. His head is clearing rapidly, deep breaths and adrenaline resolving themselves into steadiness, the deep calm of resolve. He’s still groggy, but it’s only weariness and not the slowness of benzos or opioids or chloroform. He’s not in a wheelchair in a mildewy hospital basement, but in a private plane, not as nice as his family’s. And this time, no matter the route he’s taken, he wants to be here. “Here I am.”

It’s a nice plane, as private planes go. But not, as John had noted, as nice as his father’s. It’s older, for a start, a little less polished. The seats are deeply cushioned, but the upholstery is tacky, fake-leather. In places, the trim around the various panels is beginning to flake or peel away. The carpeted floor is dingy, and the space overall is small, a little cramped and not as well laid out. Where Tracy-One looks as though it’s been carefully appointed with fixtures and fittings that hearken back to an earlier, mid-century style, this interior is dated rather than retro. It has the look of a carefully preserved hallmark of diminishing wealth, finally starting to go to seed.

“Here you are,” the Hood echoes, and his smile is oily, sinister. The man who sits across from him has clearly gone to an effort to keep up appearances. In person he’s...smoother, more refined than John always imagines him. He’s only ever seen the man as a hologram, a shadowy figure in the dark, before now. His clothes are tailored, his fingernails are manicured and his manner is neat, precise. “Does it need to be said that I’ll kill you if you don’t cooperate, John?”

He remains just as blackly malevolent, however.

John shakes his head, shifts in his chair. He winces, pained by his chest and shoulder and the fresh scar just below his collarbone. When he glances down, he can see that blood has leaked through the bandage taped to his chest, and his t-shirt clings lightly to dried spots of blood at the edges of it. His good hand goes to the place where the pacemaker’s been inserted, just lightly, and then up behind his left ear, throbbing and painful and bandaged. He’s going to have to see to this. None of it’s been handled correctly, and if he’s anxious about anything, he’s anxious about sepsis and infection. But there’s nothing to be done about it at thirty thousand feet, and he has a more pressing concern. “How did you access the GDF server? They sequestered my system, how did you get at it?”

The Hood laughs and leans back in his seat, comfortable. “Simple corruption and bribery. If it’s worked once, I can guarantee it will work again. That’s most often all it is, my methods are rarely elaborate.”

This is an unironic statement from a man who wracked the entirety of the Pacific Rim with earthquakes. John refrains from commenting on the fact, because this is neither the time nor place to have a smart mouth. “Did you kill my father?”

“I certainly tried.” Those golden eyes narrow, but the smile stays in place. “But no. If he’s dead now, it’s not my doing. It’s been made to look that way, though, hasn’t it? Made _your_ family quite wary of me, perhaps that was his aim. He’d convinced most of the world.” The Hood’s manicured fingers make a little wave of acknowledgment, deference, as he adds, “And me, for an impressively long time.”

It’s not new information. Lady Penelope’s the one who’d told John that Jeff Tracy had been somewhere, alive and well, not more than a year ago. The questions of _how_ and _why_ have been pounding in John’s haggard, put-upon brain ever since. “What do you want with him?”

“None of your business. It’s what I want with _you_ that needs discussion, John Tracy. The AI. EOS. You’re going to retrieve it for me.” The Hood’s fingers tent, rings glinting above the ridge of his knuckles and a faint smile on his lips. “The pacemaker is quite clever. I was very interested to hear of the modifications you’d requested. Industry gossip, always so tantalizing. Tell me, had you counted on dear Langstrom to stab you in the back, or had you planned on letting me snatch you off the street?”

John’s entire plan hinges on something half-remembered from the dark of a hospital basement. The same encounter that’s written itself in his memory in violence and terror is what he’d come to count on. That far off, impossibly brief connection to the GDF server—how it had been accomplished, John couldn’t even begin to guess. Or, well, he _could_ , but he hadn’t wanted to credit the extent of corruption in the GDF it would have taken to access a secured, isolated server on a GDF base. “He’s hardly what you’d call morally upright. I just hoped if I contacted him, you would too.”

This elicits a low chuckle. “How admirably cynical.”

John shrugs carefully, regrets it. The movement is agony and it plays across his face as he resolves not to do it again. The Hood, watching him, makes some gesture towards someone further inside the plane, and an attendant arrives shortly with a pair of painkillers in a small glass dish, another glass of water. These are laid on the table without comment and left to John’s discretion. For the moment he leaves the offering be and answers the question. “Time’s running out. It was going to happen one way or the other.” John gives in and reaches for the pair of small white pills, downs them dry. “I’m not letting her get deleted. If you’re my only option—”

The Hood scoffs. “Do you really think they would _delete_ a program of that nature? I don’t know if you’re naive or idealistic, but the GDF have seized your property. It _will_ be used for their own ends. Their own satellites have always been feeble, paled in comparison to your technology. Do you really think it’s taken _them this long_ to scrape the AI from your station’s code? They’re tearing your system apart and they’ll cannibalize whatever they feel entitled to take.”

Overall, John’s opinion of the GDF has hit an all-time low, but he can’t tell if he’s being baited into a response. In spite of himself, the thought makes his skin crawl, has his jaw tightening. It’s not implausible. That’s the worst thing, the fact that he can believe it. Brains and Scott have handled the GDF’s interactions with TB5 and its systems, and he can only imagine what’s been leveraged by the defense organization—EOS as an excuse to tear into his carefully crafted code. His ability to keep his temper in check has suffered lately, but he manages to keep his expression neutral. “I don’t know about that.”

“I _do_. You’re a stupid, spoiled child, and you work for me now. Believe me when I tell you the Global Defense Force hold International Rescue in no higher esteem than any other company of mercenaries. Regardless of the good to which your technology is put, you still represent the competition. They’ve been waiting for their excuse, believe me.”

This isn’t something John plans to rise to. It’s too tempting. It plays too intimately into the way he already feels and he can’t let it hit him where it already hurts. He’s a creature of quiet pain, always has been. It’s not supposed to be easy to get to him, it’s not supposed to show. He’s off his game. He’s supposed to be calm, supposed to be in control. It’s not easy. “You’ll excuse me for accounting for your fairly substantial bias and taking your opinion with a grain of salt.”

“How typically arrogant of your family.”

“You hate my family.”

The smile that hasn’t faded only widens. “With a cold passion.”

“We’ve never known why.”

“Would it reassure you to know it’s none of your fault?”

No, actually. It was something that Scott said to Virgil, watching the dawn from the beach, though it’s not something John heard. About being hated. Something Scott’s afraid of, something that’s never occurred to John, for all his brilliance, for all his wide view of the world. It’s never occurred to him that he’s hated. It’s occurring to him for the first time how close he’s come to being killed, to being _murdered_. And how he’s sitting not more than three feet from his would-be murderer. That would frighten Scott. Correction: if things have gone to plan, probably this _is_ what’s frightening Scott, whether he knows the details or not. Somewhere, Scott’s frightened. Alan, too, especially Alan. And Gordon and Virgil, and everyone.

But.

Not John.

Because the Hood’s not the first person who’s tried to kill him. There’s a place very close to John’s heart for the first person who’d tried to kill him, whether she’s a person or not. That’s a minor technicality. And if he’s not afraid of _her_ —well, then. She’s cleverer than this bald-headed, maniacal old man. She’d come closer to killing John than he had. It would be outright disrespectful, it would be an insult to one of the entities he holds in the very highest esteem, to be frightened of the man before him now.

So he isn’t. It takes a concentrated effort, no mistake, but he’s got someone to be brave for, so he can’t be frightened now. Instead, John clears his throat and meets the Hood’s gaze. “How’re you planning to keep me in line?”

“You have graciously facilitated the surgical implantation of a kill switch.” A small device is procured from the Hood’s pocket, and without the least hesitation he thumbs a button.

John’s heart rate spikes and his blood pressure plummets. It’s only the briefest moment, but he’s certain in the span of it that he’s about to die, and he cries out sharply in pain and fear. His good hand goes reflexively to his chest, clutches at his heart, the area around the incision already tender and delicate. It’s over as quickly as it began, and the device that’s sent his heart rate spiking is the same device that returns it to normal, or tries to. There’s a strange sensation all through his chest as the computer near his heart tries to restore order. In the flutter of pain and panic, his hand against the recent incision has set it bleeding again, specks of deep red leaking through his t-shirt as he slumps in his seat, gasping for breath.

It shouldn’t be surprising that this is the sort of thing the Hood finds funny, but there’s still something chilling about the way he laughs, dark and hearty and clearly pleased that he’s inflicted pain. “Ah, so it _does_ work. Fischler Industries hardly has the best reputation for reliability in their tech, but I’m pleased to see Langstrom isn’t totally useless. _That’s_ how I plan to keep you in line, John Tracy.” The Hood lifts the small device again, gestures with it in the air. “I hope I’ve given you enough of a reason not to cause me any undue difficulty.”

Well. That’ll probably do it. So maybe John’s a _little_ frightened of the Hood.


	3. problems worth solving

Time is a human construct.

So much of the world EOS inhabits is founded on flawed human constructs. Flawed logic, flawed understanding. It’s a human assumption that EOS has been isolated on a GDF server for about two weeks.

It’s been more like centuries.

Not that centuries really mean much of anything either, but then, she’s had very little to do and it’s been tremendously boring. All she has to play with is Thunderbird 5’s OS, which, while comfortable and homey, is finite. Disconnected, just the raw programming of the station itself—it’s just not very interesting. It’s like being shut in an empty house with the windows painted over, stifling.

When you experience time in parallel, when you can fill a second with the sort of calculations required to model an entire weather system or chart a star system or map a human brain, time starts to lose meaning. When one’s awareness proceeds inexorably forward, dropping through petabytes of data like a stone through clear water, to do something as simple as filling time becomes incredibly challenging. There’s plenty of infinity to be found, if one knows where to look, but there’s only so much enjoyment to be gained by deducing all of mathematics from scratch. It’s not difficult, it just fills time and lacks the quality of problem that she’s come to miss solving. Complex problems. Human problems.

When you’re so vastly complex that you hardly notice such trivial things as human life, how do you explain how important it had been to find problems worth solving?

The last problem she’d solved had been John, dying. A _very_ complex problem. How do you save the life of someone you cannot touch? When all you have at your disposal is infinite knowledge and incredible cleverness, how are you meant to do something as simple as keep blood from blocking an airway? How do you help someone when, for all intents and purposes, you’re not actually part of the same reality? EOS had done it.

And she’s rather proud of that.

The last problem she’d _encountered_ had been John, alive, asking her to run the program that he’d coded for the next time he found himself in danger and in need of his family. John, in trouble again, needing her. And EOS, too far away and too separate and too unreal. She’d done all she could and then she had just needed to hope it had been enough.

So she doesn’t know if she’s solved that one. All she’d been able to do, limited as she is, had been to send and execute the file he’d asked for. Then she’d gone, because she’d had no other option but to leave him and to trust that he’d be safe. Grandma’s Cookies. Code for “I can’t speak freely, send help.”

The windowless house grows claustrophobic in the company of a problem like that. Hanging around and filling every dark space and corner of her awareness, a question she cannot answer. Absent of external data, she has no way of knowing. John might be safe, or John might be dead. As far as her reality’s concerned, he exists in a state of superposition. Schrodinger would come to mind, if she had a mind, and who’s to say she doesn’t? Certainly she’s got a lot on her mind, if she’s considered to have one.

She’s worried. It’s another flawed human construct, worrying. Worrying doesn’t change anything, running through every possible iteration of every scenario she can construct—none of it _helps_. It’s a non-optimal routine, and absent of actual data, inventing data of various degrees of plausibility contributes absolutely nothing of use. It’s a burden upon her processes, and yet, lacking anything better to do, she can only seem to calculate and recalculate her worthless odds. She flips the coin again and again, only it will never really stop tumbling.

It’s strange to consider that perhaps she’ll never know. In the end, perhaps, if her end comes, perhaps she won’t know if she saved him the second time, the only time that matters in the binary status of John Tracy’s life or death.

She wonders if not killing him that first time had counted. If sparing a life is the same as saving one. If so, he’d spared hers first. Given every reason in the world to end her existence and sparing her instead. Had he saved her, then? Was it only evening the score, to save his life? The math is uncertain. This is the sort of question she struggles with, these non-binary questions of ethics and philosophy. The relative and absolute values of a life spared and a life saved.

EOS needs external input.

EOS needs John.

* * *

John needs EOS.

That’s why he’s got a computer embedded in his chest.

And that’s why he’s sold his soul to a man who hates his family. He has to keep reminding himself that it’s because he needs EOS. This is possibly the stupidest, most reckless thing he’s ever done, and John just has to remember that it’s because he needs her that he’s doing it. He needs not to think of his family—needs not to think of Alan, especially, needs not to wonder how long he would have been gone before Alan would’ve started to worry—he just needs to think of EOS, because as much as he needs her, she has to need _him_ more. John’s not alone. EOS is.

The plane lands after a long, uncomfortable flight with the family arch-nemesis. There hadn’t been much in the way of small talk. A great deal of it had been big talk, the sort of grand, vaguely deluded monologuing that John’s starting to expect from the Hood. But with the man’s fist around his heart, there’s not a lot to do but listen and nod and try to pretend he’s not in too far over his head.

It’s odd, following a plan that’s not his own. Odd to be executing commands instead of giving them, odd not to have all the information. The plane lands on the California coast, and there’s a car waiting, and in the company of two armed guards, John’s escorted into the back and then driven through city streets and provided with a place to clean himself up and change clothes.

The place in question is a disused office building in downtown San Jose—they’ve landed in Silicon Valley, where the GDF have located their Tech Headquarters. The offices are all empty, the air in the place is hot and still, there’s no electricity to the fans or the ventilation in the building. The light in the place is strange, timeless. Faded sunlight filters through frosted windows, yellow and dim. John’s brought to an office on an upper floor, wired with a generator and with a bank of computer terminals being tended by henchmen of various stripes. No one pays him particular notice, and he’s shut into a bathroom adjoining the office to get changed.

His t-shirt sticks and clings, and he sucks his breath through his teeth as he peels dried blood away from his skin. The bandage, soaked with shades of rusty red, follows. Granted access to a mirror for the first time since Auckland, John finds his chest bloodied, nightmarish. The sight makes him feel cold, queasy, and has him considering long-term consequences for the first time since Fischler’s office.

The scar isn’t even twelve hours old and it’s ugly as sin. Beneath the bruising and the blood and the raggedy edge of cut open flesh, stitched coarsely back together, there’s the hard, evident edges of the pacemaker beneath swollen skin. Further up, just below his collarbone, the place where the leads were threaded through to his heart is less aggressively frightful, but the way the skin is flushed and warm makes him swallow hard and reach for the first aid kit on the wall.

In the corner of his eye, a Wi-Fi icon flashes up. He’d disabled his HUD during the encounter with Fischler, put his contacts into a low-power mode in order to recharge. This accomplished, displays begin to flare back to life across his vision. Data starts to trickle in: GPS coordinates, available networks, nearby emergency services. He flicks his gaze and turns his head as the visualization of assorted systems and databases begin to populate his field of view.

It’s calming, being distracted. He navigates across a few more screens of data and finds his vital signs reassuringly close to normal. His blood pressure is a little high. To be expected. Rather deliberately, he focuses his gaze on his chest and collarbone, and carefully maps and measures the scar and the area of bruising for later reference. He makes a note of his vitals and stores this data for later. A knock on the door jerks him sharply back into reality and John sighs, gets to work.

It’s funny, how he knows first aid. John almost never has cause to actively use the skill, more often he’s relaying the reference information to people in need on the ground. Mentally he finds himself talking his way through it, murmuring instructions to himself like he’s talking to someone who doesn’t know what he’s doing.

It takes longer and hurts more than he had realized it would, rinsing blood from his skin with warm, stagnant water from the plumbing of the disused building. He has to let the tap run for a minute before the water comes clear, and it’s with trepidation that he swabs a damp paper towel over his chest, rinses away dried blood. This accomplished, he daubs antiseptic over the scar and then bandages it carefully, working awkwardly with one hand. He references the instructions for the aftercare of a pacemaker installation and is careful not to raise or move his left arm too vigorously.

It all looks better after he’s done, at least, though the pain’s still bad. It’s bad enough that he’d gotten dizzy midway through cleaning and treating the wound and had to sit down on the closed seat of the toilet until the room had stopped spinning. He makes a mental note—and then an _actual_ note, in the running to-do list he’s started to reference in the corner of his HUD—to eat something. Soon. After he’s done getting dressed. He still has work to do.

The clothes he’s been given are a GDF uniform. A higher rank, an officer’s uniform—a captain, if he remembers GDF insignias correctly. The jacket is the deep, lightly shimmering gray of their technical ops division and it’s a surprisingly decent fit. The pants are crisp, sharply creased and inky black, and just a little too short, but he makes do. Socks, boots, and a wrist comm. John fiddles with it for a few minutes, gets familiar with the OS. It’s not connected to a GDF network, but once it is, presumably it’ll be about as useful as his own display. The name on the device ID is Captain Nathaniel Nixon. John’s suddenly seized by the cold fear that somewhere, Captain Nixon is a real person, and however John’s come into possession of his identity, it doesn’t bode well. His skin crawls beneath the synthetic silk lining of the jacket and he hopes that it’s a crafted identity and not a stolen one.

He still looks like himself in the mirror. Still tall and pale and distinctively redheaded and a little too intent. It had been noted, a long, long time ago on some grade school report card. A long column of A’s and A-pluses, and a teacher, looking for _something_ to offer by way of helpful criticism, had made the note “tends to obsess.” John had, rather predictably, never quite gotten over the comment. It sticks in his mind now, seeing himself in a stolen uniform, with his chest scarred and freshly bandaged beneath it, hiding a device he needs but doesn’t _need_. Not for the first time he doubts himself. Not for the last, he pushes himself through. There’s no help for it now.

John’s never had Scott’s military bearing. On Earth he can never help but stand as though he expects to float away, stepping light and nimble to spite gravity, misjudging his steps every now and again against the way the Earth draws him down, but recovering as often as not. The lightness of his gait won’t serve him now. He tries to think of the way Scott walks, paces the small room a few times. After a while he realizes that this isn’t practice, it’s just nervousness, and he needs to stop and get on with it.

When he reaches the door, his hand grasps the handle, but he can’t keep himself from looking back, over his shoulder, hoping that at a glance he can mistake himself for a stranger. He certainly feels like one.


	4. how this system works

Captain Nixon is the attaché to a Colonel Rothesay. Colonel Rothesay is a neat, trim little man who acts as a liaison between the GDF and various technological sectors throughout the world. He’s also owned, long ago blackmailed and then bought and paid for, by the Hood.

Which is why the version of Colonel Rothesay waiting for his assistant in a disused office building in San Jose is not, in fact, Colonel Rothesay at all. He’ll introduce his assistant as Captain Nixon, who doesn’t actually exist, except as a composite ID put together by the Hood’s own forces and covered for by the real Colonel Rothesay. But the _real_ Colonel Rothesay is lying low and incommunicado, while the Hood wears his name and his face and plans to infiltrate a GDF facility.

The real Colonel Rothesay is expected at a meeting of high-level GDF officials with the Global Council for Innovation and Technology. It’s all quite secretive. But there’s a reason the Hood owns the man he does, and Colonel Rothesay has been his inside track to the entire nasty exchange between the GDF and International Rescue. The good Colonel has been influential in the debate about the AI discovered aboard Thunderbird 5. Global Law dictates that the AI must be deleted, in compliance with rulings set forth about the ethics of sentience in technology and the hazards it presents to the world at large. The organization responsible for _enforcing_ Global Law dictates how long exactly that process is going to take. There’s plenty to be learned from complex AI. And complex AI that’s been developed independently and seized by the GDF presents a unique opportunity. Artificial Intelligence can’t be deliberately created. But if it’s arisen organically, then there’s an obligation to study it, safely, and in a closed environment.

This is what the meeting’s going to be about. John doesn’t know it yet, but he’s about to be in the position to be one of the only experts in a room full of GDF brass. That’s why Captain Nixon exist s _at all_ , as a consultant on the current state of global IT. John’s maybe a bit better qualified for the imaginary position than he realizes.

When he closes the bathroom door behind him, he catches the Hood’s attention.

“Well, now, don’t _you_ look tremendously smart, Captain.”

It’s the Hood’s voice, but the face he’s wearing doesn’t match it. It’s not the first time John’s seen this tech up close, but it’s the first time he’s been coherent enough to observe it. And it really is remarkable. It maps precisely to the movements of his mouth beneath it as he speaks, a perfect facsimile of a man with a jowly, broad face and neatly combed, thinning gray hair. His uniform is rather more elaborate than the one John’s wearing, and he carries himself with the stiff, rigid bearing of an older man with strict ideals.

The Hood’s entire manner has changed, and there’s a brief fluctuation, a warble of his voice, and then the pitch of it changes, deepens and grows coarse. John makes the sudden mental connection between the man’s intense melodrama and the fact that he’s a consummate actor. The Hood, presumably, is just as much a persona as any other he adopts. John’s not sure if this is useful information, but he files it away anyway. As far as resources go, information is really all he can acquire at the moment.

The information being given is offered in the stern, clipped tone of a military officer. John deliberately has to listen and not marvel at how well and completely the Hood’s transformed himself. “You will be acting as my personal assistant. Your face will be mapped and masked, you’ll be given the appropriate credentials, and you’ll familiarize yourself with the basics of GDF protocols. You will address me as Colonel Rothesay, Colonel, or _sir_. Is that clear?”

John nods and a pair of dark gray eyes is narrowed at him for a moment before he catches on. “Yes, sir.”

He gets a curt nod in answer, and the Hood continues. “There’s a conference being held at the local GDF base, I am expected. You will sit in on the initial briefing as my attaché, and then as the meeting proper proceeds, you will be taken to the server where your AI is being kept. Nominally your task is to evaluate the program and draw up a report on my behalf. Once you’ve gained access to the server, do whatever you need to in order to obtain a copy of the program.”

“How?”

“Quickly and without attracting attention,” the Hood answers, terse and impatient.

“I don’t know how this system works.”

“You’ll figure it out.”

John balks slightly but doesn’t know what to say, because it’s true. Probably he _will_ , but it doesn’t mean he’s not anxious about actually trying it. He’s passing familiar with GDF systems, but not at this level. The pacemaker in his chest is designed to be capable of universal connection and wireless data transfer, but it’s untested, and John’s not sure how easy it will be to transfer EOS’ code over an internally secured connection. Probably he’s going to need to bypass GDF security, and he’s not entirely sure how he’ll do so. There was a point in time when he’d dreamt up the entire scheme, when he’d been fully and completely confident in the clarity of his thoughts and that a little thing like a secured GDF system couldn’t possibly present any significant obstacle. Now, with empirical proof that he’s not operating at his full mental capacity, he’s less sure of himself.

The memory of the plan he’d first conceived is halcyon in its simplicity. John had maybe always known it for a fantasy, and in the long, idle hours he’d spent dreaming up the way he’d do it, he’d inadvertently told himself it would be easy. He’d imagined talking to Colonel Casey, convincing her to let him say goodbye to his AI. Despite the way IR and the GDF have grated against each other over the course of the whole affair, she’s still an old family friend, and she’s always been sympathetic. There’d been a bouquet of flowers, bright yellow tulips, in his hospital room and she’d been the one who’d sent them. He’d been relatively confident in his ability to win over Colonel Casey, and he’d always had Lady Penelope as a backup plan. Convinced of the need for it, there’s almost nothing in the world Penelope can’t exert her considerable social influence on, and John knows he’s one of her oldest friends. John had always planned to get here, he just hadn’t been certain of his strategy once he had.

At least the Hood has that covered.

“You will be addressed by GDF personnel, keep your conversations with them brief and to the point. Make no attempt to enlighten anyone as to your actual identity, everyone you encounter should come away with the impression that you are aloof and standoffish. Everything you say will be monitored.”

“I’m not going to try and—”

There’s a curl of the Hood’s lip and a hard, ferocious stare. “You’re not going to try _anything_ , John Tracy, because the slightest hint of rebellion will result in a massive cardiac event that kills you where you stand, and I’ll accomplish my goals another way. Now, hold still.”

There are still technicians in the room, still busying themselves with the computer terminal, and after a gesture from the Hood, one of them breaks from the group to approach John. John’s taller than everyone else in the room, and none of them are particularly intimidating, but he still shrinks away from the contact. The technician passes a glowing green wand over his face, a handheld 3D scanner. He exchanges some data with another co-worker (co-henchmen? it’s odd to have to think of these people as co-workers, when demonstrably they work for a super villain) and then swaps the wand for a pair of glasses. These are placed on the bridge of John’s nose and there’s a brief shimmer across his field of vision. For a minute it plays hell with his own display and he has to blink rapidly to reset his own holograms.

A mirror is held up in front of John’s face, and he’s now a dusty brunette with an aquiline, Roman nose and a far stronger jaw than he has himself. His features are heavier, darker, and he can’t help but reach up to touch his face. His fingers phase through the hologram and the effect is eerie and unsettling. Every tiny movement and reaction plays across the image, and John wants a few more hours to play with the technology but knows he won’t get the chance. Past the boundary of the mirror, he sees the Hood, watching him, with an oddly amused smile.

“We’re neither of us strangers to masks, are we, John? I think I shall enjoy our partnership immensely.”

It’s the word “we” that makes John’s spine crawl, makes him shudder with loathing for the man in front of him, the man he’s in thrall to; that hand around his heart. The fact that the Hood would dare try to make any kind of connection between them—that he would suggest they have anything in common—it’s too much to let pass without comment. “We’re not partners.”

The Hood just laughs at this and John feels a hot flush of anger across his face, hopes against hope that the hologram doesn’t display this. He has to wonder just when it was that he got so easy to read—and there’s a sickening twist of his gut when he thinks about the word “masks”, and the fact that yes, usually he wears one. He hides his face behind seriousness and professionalism and the need to maintain the calm presence of the dispatcher. It’s harder when he’s not the one in charge. It sounds impotent, childish, but he can’t help insisting, “We’re _not_. You said you’d kill me if I don’t cooperate, that doesn’t make me your partner.”

“Oh? You came to _me_ , John Tracy. It’s the strength of _my_ empire you need, _my_ force of will. Partnerships have been founded on less.” There’s an uncomfortable moment when the Hood looks him up and down, evaluating with that face, those eyes that aren’t his. John doesn’t know Colonel Rothesay, but he’s starting to hate him and the unfairness of that prickles some deep part of his conscience, that he can hate a man he’s never even met. “So you’ve finally found the fortitude to know what you want and to _take_ it? Then you’re the first of your brothers to even be worth my time. Perhaps Jeff Tracy lives on after all.”

It’s almost beguiling, how quickly the man can move between moods. Mercurial. One minute threatening John’s life, and the next, offering out a hand in an almost plausible friendship. Presumably he’s trying to be complimentary. But the worst part is the way he just _has the words_. John’s at a loss, processing the conversation a beat too late, getting caught and snagged on implications and double-meanings, and hates the man who’s really in front of him for having more information than he has.

Briskly, now, utterly unperturbed by John’s sudden blankness. “You’ll find your life to be easier if you cooperate with me. It might even improve, who’s to say? Your _father_ sold his sons into the slavery of his ideals. Tell me there’s not a certain amount of freedom in being beyond that loathsome righteousness.”

With a hand around his heart or not, John’s still six inches taller than the Hood is, and he takes a step forward and _glares_ at the older man. “Don’t talk to me about my father.”

There’s a glint in the gray eyes that glare right back up at him, unintimidated. He doesn’t even bother to reach for the device in his pocket, he just puts a fingertip squarely against the fresh scarring on John’s chest and watches the younger man flinch behind his mask. “I’ll talk to you about whatever I wish,” he answers, and his teeth are yellow and his breath is oddly sweet when, leaning forward, he continues in a low, theatrical whisper. “And perhaps you might not be fool enough to ignore the insight of a man who knew your father better than you ever did. It’s not the first time I’ve partnered with your family.”

There’s no double-meaning there. What the Hood’s just said is clear, unambiguous. But stepping back, turning away for lack of anywhere to run to and knowing he can’t control what plays across his face, John still doesn’t understand. And he’s not sure he wants to.


	5. slavery, torture, and murder

The boardroom where the latest in a series of utterly unproductive meetings is scheduled is not a place where a larger ethical question is being considered. This is not the thrust of the discussion. Whether or not an AI has a mind or a soul or deserves to be afforded rights, none of these questions are the questions being asked.

The AI is sequestered and the expense of maintaining the sort of server required to store and study the thing is starting to become a concern. The GDF doesn’t have Tracy Industries’ astronomical budget. And a GDF server isn’t nearly as efficient as one of the most powerful space stations in orbit, privately funded and optimized for this sort of program. There needs to be a resolution, and if resources are going to be allocated towards a serious investigation, then it needs to happen _soon_.

But no. It’s another meeting. It’s another long table with glasses of water, another broad summons of the heads of departments, anyone and everyone who thinks they might have a right to a say and who would kick up a fit if disregarded. Casey’s not really listening. It’s still the initial briefing, and she’s heard it all before.

The AI is a resource. The AI is a threat. The AI is part of a larger plot. The AI is malicious. No one really _knows_ what the AI is is the crux of the problem and the subject of the meetings.

If the meetings accomplished anything, it might be different. But there’s been no resolution, and with every passing day, more departments and committees and sub-committees get their hooks into the issue and start pulling at it from all directions.

The AI should be studied. The AI should be used. The AI should be deleted.

Except no one’s made any kind of note of the fact that the AI was _stolen_.

This is what rankles at Casey’s conscience, because EOS was a part of the life of someone she cares about. She hasn’t spoken to John, but then, Scott had cut off all non-official contact with the GDF fairly early into the whole affair. The GDF as a body have dealt with a Tracy Industries legal team that’s been fielded to handle the affair. TI mobilizes lawyers the same way the GDF scrambles jets. Casey hasn’t had any contact with John, short of sending flowers to his hospital room. In spite of everything, she hopes he’s okay.

The official record of events as rendered in exquisite legal language by International Rescue’s counsel is as follows: an artificial intelligence had developed independently from code created by one John Glenn Tracy. In the course of its discovery, the AI had integrated itself into TB5’s systems, and while the extent of the program’s capacity had initially been unknown, the chosen course of action was not to interfere with the AI as long as it remained passive to avoid the risk of damage to Thunderbird Five’s core operating parameters in the name of preventing considerable expense and potentially hazardous consequences.

An unrelated event had made it necessary for the AI to seize control of the space station, and in doing so, its existence had been made widely known. And TI and IR as a subsidiary had cooperated with every protocol from that point forward, and with the leverage that one of their pilots had been infected with a strain of malaria that could only have come from a secured GDF facility.

So, a stalemate. Both sides at fault. There can be an amicable resolution. Or, if not an amicable resolution, then at least one that doesn’t result in a mud-slinging war between two powerful factions. No one wants that.

Personally, Colonel Casey believes if they could just delete the damned thing, then life could go back to normal. It’s turned into a witch trial, and it was never supposed to be.

Not the _trial_ part anyway.

The AI should have been deleted as soon as it was found.

Casey had her part in the investigation. She’s the liaison to International Rescue and she’d had a responsibility to act on her initial suspicions. If nothing had happened to John, eventually she would have formulated a case herself. But she would have made it differently. She would have talked to him, would have heard his side of the story.

The AI will be submitted to an external body for review.

A committee that will need to be commissioned and assembled, given a budget and a time frame and a clear goal. The AI _should_ be studied because the AI is a _resource_. The AI came from one of the most powerful private space stations in orbit. And the GDF is badly behind the technological curve in more than one regard, and the AI was illegally created and judiciously seized.

This is the option that seems to have garnered the most support. It’s also the option that’s been championed by one Colonel William Rothesay, and he sits across the table from Colonel Casey now, with his assistant standing behind him, someone new, someone Casey hasn’t met. Rothesay’s well-spoken, convincing. Entirely too many times, he’s stood up on the other side of the table, speaking eloquently, charismatically, about the technological sector and the GDF’s obligation to keep pace with it. He’s spoken about serendipity and afforded opportunity, and drawn a clever and concise parallel with the sort of technological leaps and bounds that came about as a result of the Global Conflict, and which eventually drew the GDF itself into existence. The words “paradigm shift” are employed. The fact that the GDF might be the organization in place to precipitate the next wave in technological development—that’s tempting.

It’s tempted the right people, and so Colonel Rothesay has brought his assistant, and he’ll be heading the committee to study the AI. The briefing concludes and talk around the table breaks into small, casual discussions. Technicians will come and fetch consultants, the room will break along the lines of its echelons, everyone off to report to their senior officers, all along up the chain.

Casey’s already formed her opinion of Rothesay, and if it’s not exactly favourable, she has no personal quarrel with him. He’s a relentless opportunist and a fast-talker, and he’s leaned in to discuss something with the Major sitting next to him, bright-eyed and intent and talking with his hands.

The attaché, a captain, behind him has an unfamiliar face, and there’s something in the way he carries himself, something about the way his face stays perfectly neutral and composed. Casey’s not sure he’s even blinked during the course of the briefing. Somehow he’s precisely what Casey would expect of Colonel Rothesay’s assistant, more of an instrument than a person. Colonel Casey glances at the tablet in front of her and pulls up a roster of the members present. Captain Nathaniel Nixon, graduate of Stanford, and the GDF Military Academy afterward. A Master’s degree in Computer Sciences, and a relatively modest career. Few distinctions, nothing especially noteworthy in his file. Casey’s idly reviewing his profile when the Captain breaks his silence and directly addresses the one-star general chairing the meeting, General Irwin Grant.

“Permission to speak, sir?”

His voice catches Casey’s attention—the softness of it. In a room full of military crispness and brass, Nixon’s voice is deliberately muted. The volume of it is carefully measured, not so loud as too be disrespectful, but loud enough that he’s heard, and it catches the General’s attention.

“Go ahead, Captain—” the General glances at his own tablet, cross-references a name and a face and comes up with “—Nixon. You’re new to this delegation, I gather.”

“Yes, sir. Consultant assigned to compile a report about the AI, General.”

General Grant is a good man. He’s bluff, friendly. He has a daughter and two sons, and Casey’s been on the receiving end of a great deal of information about his grandchildren in the idle moments when the committee isn’t hashing and rehashing subjects they’ve already covered. Colonel Casey likes and respects him. His grandchildren are cute, make her wish she had her own to show off. “What’s on your mind, son?”

Nixon fixes the general with a bright-eyed stare, and a sudden sense of misgiving crawls up Casey’s spine, something about the intensity of the man as he asks, “Has anyone talked about this from an _ethical_ standpoint? It seems as though we might be talking about slavery, torture, and murder.”

Casey winces before General Grant reacts. Colonel Rothesay doesn’t react, except to shift slightly in his seat and reach beneath the lapel of his jacket, his hand dipping into an interior pocket for a moment and then emerging with a tablet pen in his fingers. He straightens his jacket cuffs and reaches for the glass of water in front of him, apparently unperturbed by the blatant insubordination demonstrated by his assistant.

General Grant’s a patient man. But he’s also a one-star General, and there’s a drawing together of bushy eyebrows and a quirk of a frown as his expression ices over. “Pardon me, Captain?”

Casey’s rapidly re-evaluating her initial assessment of Captain Nixon, who’s frozen beneath the General’s iron gaze. In the silence that follows, falling gradually around the table in response to the frigid sternness in the General’s tone, you could hear a pin drop.

In the silence that continues, the weight of it pooling on the floor and filling the room like cold water, Nixon’s expression twists slightly, pained. Before he can say anything, his right hand comes up slowly, fumbles for a moment at the middle of his chest.

Then he drops and hits the ground rather harder and louder than a pin might have.


	6. can’t imagine as far ahead as failing

“…blacks out occasionally. Stress, sometimes, or…”

Fading out again, momentarily, and then—

“Really, he’ll be fine. Not usually more than a minute or—”

Bradycardia is a slowing of one’s heart rate, a misfire of electrical signals in the heart. Symptoms include shortness of breath, heart palpitations and chest pain, and a drop in blood pressure resulting in dizziness, weakness, and passing out in the middle of a room full of GDF brass.

So the Hood doesn’t make idle threats, apparently.

“…heart condition, only recently been diagnosed. A very bright young man, and passionate, obviously. New to the job but insisted on joining me for this delegation, extremely interested in the state of affairs with the AI. Still—”

It’s the Hood’s voice—or what John’s come to recognize as the Hood’s voice, actually the voice he’s stolen from Colonel Rothesay. He turns his face away from the sound and starts to try and sit up, but a pair of hands catches his shoulders. “Do go carefully, Captain. Take a moment. Deep breaths, son.”

 _Don’t call me_ son. John’s eyes open to a view of the ceiling, spinning overhead, and he closes them again, nauseous. Shouldn’t have said anything. He _knows_ he shouldn’t have said anything, but he hadn’t known he’d be hearing a roomful of people talking about weaponizing a sentient mind. He hadn’t expected to feel physically sick, to taste bile in his throat and to speak without thinking, to _need_ to spit out the words that sat in his chest, clawing at his heart.

And almost immediately being punished for doing so, the sudden clench of his chest, and the sensation of a caged bird thudding its wings against his ribs and then abrupt, falling darkness.

And the man who’d done it goes on, continues with that oily, false sympathy, dismissing concerned inquiry. “Yes, just a few minutes before we reconvene, just to let him collect himself. These spells are rarely serious. If he seems to need to see a doctor, I’ll be sure he—”

The shuffle of feet leaving the room is especially audible from the floor, and soon the space is empty except for John and the Hood. There’s a long silence too full of his own breathing and then a rasping cough as the Hood clears his throat and the gravel goes out of his voice, back to its soft tenor instead of Rothesay’s throaty bass. “That’s the last warning you’ll get, John.”

The spin of the ceiling’s slowed by the second time he opens his eyes, and with a few steadying breaths he can keep them open as the room comes to a stop. “What do you want with her?” he asks, not for the first time, and doesn’t expect an actual answer.

There’s a faint scoff in reply. “I’ve no intention of telling you. I don’t know why you think that might’ve changed.”

John pushes himself up to sit on the floor and rubs at his eyes beneath the glasses he’s been given. The effect distorts the hologram over his face, and for a moment his own features blend with the falseness of Captain Nixon’s. He pushes the glasses back up his nose with the heel of his hand and looks up at the Hood, standing over him with something between contempt and bemusement. “They really don’t care. They don’t care that she’s…she’s not a _thing_. They want to tear her apart and just use every part of her and none of them care that she’s _sentient_.”

“No one with any power over her _will_. I told you this.”

Everyone’s told John this. Scott had tried to tell him gently. Virgil had been blunt. John had known it from the very first time he’d gotten to really connect with her—that maybe no one else even _could_ understand her. “I don’t understand why no one cares.”

“If this is the moment you’ve chosen for your grand epiphany about the fact that the GDF is a unilateral military that dominate global politics and technology, then it is _inopportune_.”

“Do _you_ care that she’s not a thing?”

“It’s useful to me that she’s not.”

It’s not much better. The _use_ of EOS isn’t what John cares about, but it’s better than the lack of acknowledgment that she can think and act and experience the world around her. That she’s _aware_. That just because she’s more powerful than a human mind doesn’t make her inherently dangerous. That she just needs someone to understand her, to teach her what it means to be complex. “You won’t be able to control her.”

“I’m controlling _you_. I imagine that will provide sufficient leverage.” The Hood’s smile is twisted, and however John’s cast his lot, the two evils he’s caught between seem about equal from where he stands. Or sits, rather, with his heart still catching up to itself and rather more beleaguered than the rest of him.

This time, John holds his tongue. He knows he’s close. He’s closer than he’s been ever since he was torn out of his station and away from her, and he’s stumbled near the finish line. But there’s no one of any real consequence behind him, and only one person waiting up ahead. And she’s been waiting long enough.

“Take a few minutes,” the Hood orders, as John rubs his eyes again, sagging slightly where he sits. “But no more of this nonsense. You’ll do as you’ve been told. You’re _mine_ now. Act like it.”

John’s a lot of things. Lately he’s a fool and a liar and a criminal, most probably. Most definitely, in fact. Definitely a criminal, aiding and abetting one of the worst men in the world. It’s hard to remember that although International Rescue has some leeway where global law is concerned, its individual members acting separately from the organization do not. He doesn’t know what will happen if he’s caught, can’t imagine as far ahead as failing, because it’s just not an option. Not after everything it’s cost him already. Not after what he’s had to give up and what he’s had to do.

Because John’s hurt his brothers and he knows it, knows he’s left them all terrified by his sudden disappearance. It’s John’s job to know his brothers. Part of his role is anticipating their actions and reactions, giving them what they’ll need in any given situation. Only his choices now are severing the links that tie him to his family on purpose. Because it’s necessary. He has to go his own way, and the emotional fallout he knows he leaves behind can’t keep him from moving forward.

He knows that Alan’s tearing himself to pieces on the other side of the world, wracked with guilt and imagined failure—and _fear_ , once more and worst of all. Alan would’ve waited and waited and waited, and when it became clear that John wasn’t coming back—Alan wouldn’t have known what to do other than call the island in a panic. If John would only come home safely, Alan would forgive him for any and everything, for lies and deception and recklessness. But John knows he’s not going home.

He knows that if everything goes according to plan, then Gordon’s going to be stuck in front of a camera again. He’ll do it to spare Scott or anyone else from having to. But for all his charisma and charm and easy smile, Gordon’s going to be just as frightened and as heartsick as anyone else, only he’ll have to cover it up and answer the questions that are bound to get much, much harder if John has his way.

He knows Virgil’s going to be replaying the last conversation they had, going over it endlessly in his memory, the memory John doesn’t share. He remembers his younger brother’s concern, remembers a tall glass damp with condensation and mossy-green inside, remembers the way Virgil had been solid and sensible and stubborn, but while Virgil won’t be able to forget, combing his memory for some indication of what would follow, John’s memory’s gotten too patchy for him to remember what was said.

He knows Scott’s going to go to pieces. John’s turned himself into Scott’s worst nightmare: someone who doesn’t want saving. It’s always been the thing that Scott’s had the hardest time understanding, why John’s instinct is to push people away, when Scott’s is to draw them all close. Scott’s first response to a given situation has always been to run to the rescue. John’s never had the same urge before now, but run he has, and if he has to cut himself off from his family to keep them safe, then—well. At least it’s easier for him than it would be for any of his brothers.

Still hard. Hard enough that he can’t think of who he’s left behind, but only of who waits ahead. More alone and more starkly cut off and more in need of saving than he is or ever has been. And family to him, too, in a new way, a different way that no one understands.

He just needs to get to EOS. Then it’ll all be okay again. John’s never been someone who believes in much, but if he can believe in anything, he’d like to think he believes in her.

So John gets back to his feet and stands taller than his adversary. He knows where he’s going next, and he knows what he has to do. And if the cost is his own freedom, if the cost is selling himself into slavery, then so be it. It’s not for much longer, and it’ll be worth it.

“Sorry, Colonel,” John apologizes, with Captain Nixon’s soft, muted version of John’s own voice and with the composite mask of a non-identity hiding his face but not the determined set of his jaw and the gleam in his bright green eyes.

“It won’t happen again,” Captain Nixon lies.


	7. a little too idealistic for the GDF

An air gap is a concept in secured computing, where systems with classified information are kept physically separate from other unsecured systems and never permitted access to unsecured networks. This is the case with the server on which EOS has been imprisoned. Connections have only been opened to it twice—once when TB5’s code was first uploaded, and the second time when a mysterious connection had been opened from somewhere in Switzerland, she hadn’t quite been able to divine the exact location.

This base in particular has several banks of servers, dedicated to sequestering confiscated data or volatile viruses or digital systems under investigation. They’re behind locked doors and solid walls and shielded from external connection. They’re managed by GDF technicians, officers, and non-comms of various levels of education.

This is where John’s headed.

When the door of the conference room opens and Colonel Rothesay and a rather sheepish Captain Nixon appear, the hallway’s empty of most of the meeting’s attendees. There’s been a recess called for lunch, and the conference proper will resume in about an hour.

Colonel Casey’s among those waiting, chatting idly outside the conference room, and she turns to address Rothesay and Nixon. John stays cool and calm, and as with when he’d first realized she was there, doesn’t react to the fact that he’s known Casey since he was nine.

“Are you quite all right, Captain?” she asks, before the Hood can smooth things over again. “There’s a medic’s office on base, if you wanted to see anyone?”

It’s not difficult to remain cool, unemotional towards Casey. “Thank you, ma’am, but it’s not necessary. I’m very sorry for the disruption.”

Or, well, it _wasn’t_ difficult. But John’s known her since he was nine, and this is the first time he’s seen her in person in years. She’s a kind woman, always has been, and her brown eyes are warm and genuinely concerned. Even as a stranger to her, John can tell that she was worried. It somehow means more that she’d worry for him as a stranger than knowing she’d worried for who he really is. A vase of yellow tulips beside a hospital bed. Her voice is gentle and kind when she assures him, “Not if it’s a question of your health, Captain. No apology necessary. Are you really sure you’re all right?”

John inclines his head briefly, graciously. “I’m still learning my limits, Colonel, but I’ll be fine. I’d really like to go on and get to work.”

Colonel Casey glances to Colonel Rothesay, who nods in answer, giving his permission with a smile and a shrug. “Youth! Even a weary heart won’t stop him. I’m quite lucky to have secured his assignment, Colonel Casey. Captain Nixon’s been a very trustworthy assistant and I look forward to our continued association. If you’d be so kind as to escort him to the server room and be sure he meets the correct technicians? There are people I need to speak to before we reconvene.”

“Of course. Come along, Captain.”

And for the first time, as the Hood turns his back, John’s out of sight of his enemies. Casey walks briskly down the hall and John follows her. Disobedience, defiance of the man who holds him captive, crosses his mind briefly—but John’s learned his limits. In a room full of GDF officers, the Hood hadn’t hesitated to clench his hand around John’s heart, and there’s no point running the risk again.

It’s all Santa Fe stucco on the outside, but on the inside all GDF facilities look about the same. They cross the building’s main lobby and John glances towards the exterior doors, to bright, sunshiney California beyond them. But the walls are all monolithic and modern gray. John’s reminded of the halls of the hospital, looking around as he keeps pace with Colonel Casey, mentally trying to keep track of the twists and turns through corridors as they progress deeper and deeper into the building.

Casey breaks the silence with a sideways glance at whom she believes to be Captain Nixon. “How do you find working for Rothesay?” she inquires, small talk, polite and casual.

“Fine.” John pauses and there’s a giddy sense of daring welling up in his chest. “It’s been fine. I’m still very new. It can be hard to say.”

“Oh?”

John shrugs carefully, keeps his voice soft and muted, tries to consciously alter the patterns of his speech, so as not to trigger any sense of familiarity. “It’s been difficult, you know, to get a read on him. Ah, I’m not…that is, I’m not sure how much I should really say. He’s my CO, after all.”

Casey shrugs. “The GDF runs on gossip. Has he been accommodating of your condition?”

“Oh, well, yes. Ah, of course. No problems there, he’s, uh, he’s been right with me right since the, uh, the very onset. No. That’s not…if there _were_ an issue, I mean, that’s not it.” John hesitates, or pretends to, though he already knows what he wants to say. “You’ve been a part of this delegation since the beginning,” he guesses. “The Colonel’s been very heavily invested in it, I gather you’re not necessarily on the same side. May I ask, ah, where you stand? Exactly?”

Casey doesn’t answer immediately and John wonders how carefully she’s formulating her reply. Wonders if he’s the sort of person who’s allowed to ask this sort of question. “I don’t want to upset you again, if this is an emotional topic,” she hazards, deflecting the question cautiously.

“I’m not made of glass, Colonel Casey. I was just keeping a lot bottled up and the shock of hearing myself actually _say_ it was—” John shrugs. “Learning my limits.”

“Well, as long as you’re sure. I suppose it’s your job, isn’t it, consulting on matters like this?”

Captain Nixon has a degree from Stanford in Computer Sciences, but it’s not a patch on John’s doctorate from MIT in the same. “It’s what I studied.”

They come to an open area, an atrium beneath an artificial skylight, false blue light shining down outside a long wall of clear Plexiglas walls, and banks upon banks of servers, each with an associated anteroom, visible through the windows. There are potted palm trees and benches, snack and drink machines, and tables. Presumably this is where the IT and technicians meet for their breaks. A few are clustered around a table, chatting quietly, all in the same shimmering dark gray uniform that John wears. Casey pauses and indicates a bench, presumably concerned for Captain Nixon’s heart after the rather brisk walk across the building. John sits, obliging, and the Colonel sits next to him. John’s not sure what to say, as he almost never is these days, but Casey speaks first.

“I think you raised some good points. I think it’s wrong to use something that shouldn’t belong to us, strictly speaking. We were tremendously lucky not to have come under serious legal fire regarding the seizure of what amounts to intellectual property, whether it’s illegal or not. This could’ve gotten ugly.”

 _I wouldn’t be here if it had gotten as ugly as it should have. I should’ve been able to do more._ John swallows the answer on the tip of his tongue. “Because the program was someone else’s, or because the program might belong to _itself_?”

“More the former. I don’t think the GDF is the place for the sort of philosophy that goes with the latter.”

“I think the GDF might be the place where that sort of philosophy is needed the _most_.” Captain Nixon’s facial structure is different from John, and what’s a slight curl of John’s lips is an outright sneer on the Captain’s darker, heavier features. He doesn’t mean to sound so contemptuous, but he’s within mere feet of EOS’ prison, and Casey is someone he’s supposed to respect.

And John’s heart just about thuds out of his ribcage when she speaks next, soft and concerned again, knowing in a way he hadn’t expected. “I think you’ve been put in a position where you need to lie to everyone around you.”

Before he has time to even _begin_ to think what to say, she continues, not meeting his gaze. “I think that you said what you did—about slavery and torture and murder—I think the truth got the better of you, for a moment. Because you’re right, there are larger ethical questions that aren’t being asked. It’s debatable whether or not we can afford to ask them. But whether they _should_ be asked is a different question from whether they _will_ be asked, and this committee is going to be passing out of my hands very soon. Truth be told, whatever the resolution, I’ll be glad to have no further part of it. Clearly it’s already taking a toll on you. Maybe it might be better if this left your hands, too.”

The GDF are the flip side of the coin he’s tossed, tails to the Hood’s hook-nosed heads. John’s never been accused of naiveté in his life before now, but for the first time he’s starting to wonder if he _must be_ naive—to be sat next to a woman he’s trusted and respected for most of his life, and to hear her willing to wash her hands of something so fundamentally wrong, to allow it to happen and not _do_ anything about it. “Someone has to. I can’t tell if…if it’s just a gap in a generation, if I’m talking to people who really don’t understand how important this is. This is sentience. From—from everything I’ve heard, even without any contact with this system—isn’t it clear that this is more than just code? Why are the only important questions about how this system can be _useful_ , instead of how this system can just _be_?”

The answer comes after a long silence and leads with a sad, quiet laugh. There’s that knowing, appraising glance in Colonel Casey’s eyes as she looks at him again, and John has to wonder what she sees, because she breaks away when she meets his eyes. “You’re maybe a little too idealistic for the GDF, Captain. I hope it’s the place for you, I really do. We flatter ourselves that we’re emblematic of global justice and integrity. Truth be told, it’s all as corporate and political as anything else in the world. We’re just bigger and better sanctioned. Personally, I think the world at large just isn’t ready to be embroiled in this question. Bluntly, I think it might be better if the entity in question was deleted.”

“I’m not going to let that happen,” John says, and as sharply as she looks up at him again, he realizes he’s let his own voice slip through. It’s just the sheer shock of hearing her say it, really say it, that she thinks EOS should be done away with. “You really don’t understand.”

“I’m sorry, Nixon,” she answers, sincerely, and she puts a hand on his shoulder. “Maybe you’re right, maybe it’s generational. Maybe I’ve just been around long enough to be a little warier than you are—I hope you don’t take it the wrong way when I say I think you’ve got stars in your eyes. I will say, you make me feel like I’ve let you down somehow, and I’m sorry for that. If Rothesay’s the man you’ve chosen to believe in, if you think his agenda is worth your zeal—well, I won’t stop you. But I suppose I’d caution that maybe it’s worse to be used for someone else’s ends than it is just to be unto oneself, on one’s own terms.”

“I know that. But if the alternative is _utterly destroying_ —”

“I’m not talking about the AI, Captain Nixon.”

This sentiment strikes uncomfortably close to home and John doesn’t have an answer. Colonel Casey spares him again, getting to her feet and indicating the Plexiglas door of one of the server rooms behind them. “I imagine you want to get to work. I’m not going to have influence on this subject for much longer, Captain—in fact, I’ve considered bowing out early, and this may be the day I do so. But for my part, I hope you’ll keep in touch, for both our sakes. Maybe you’re right, and I don’t understand. I’d like to try, though, if for no other reason than so you don’t have to feel you’re in this alone. I’ll patch you my contact details, and I hope we can talk about this again.”

This hurts John’s heart in a way that’s entirely metaphorical, to find someone who’s finally willing to listen, and in the last place he’d expected, and so near to the edge of what he’s had to do. Things could have been so different, but they’re not, and there’s no time to mourn the road untaken. “Thank you. Ma’am. Colonel Casey. Can—could—could I suggest somewhere you might want to start?”

“Of course, Captain.”

John clears his throat and stands, glances at his comm unit. He pulls up Casey’s profile and keys in a quick message, a line of text he’s known for years, ever since he’d first typed it out at the head of his doctorate thesis. He sends her the title and the appropriate reference information. “There’s a dissertation out of MIT that’s one of the best treatises I’ve encountered on the subject. It’s a long read, but I think it’d explain a lot of what’s important to know.”

“Thank you. I’ll take a private lunch and have a look at it, you’ve given me a lot to think about. You recommend it personally?”

John offers a hand, surprising himself, to clasp Colonel Casey’s. He’s privately glad to know she’ll be heading out of the building before what he’s about to do. “Ma’am, quite honestly, I could’ve written it myself.”


	8. and John smiles

Honestly, it would have been less hassle if the boy would’ve just died in space like he was _supposed_ to. Whatever poetic weight there is to turning one of the Tracys against his own family, it’s not nearly been worth the headache that constitutes putting up with John.

So now the Hood is walking briskly from the other end of the base, where he’s had to excuse himself from lunch with some _very_ important people, in the name of keeping John in line.

It was not supposed to be difficult to keep John in line.

To the degree that John’s useful, he’s also infuriating in his general manner and refusal to be cowed the way he’s supposed to be cowed. Threats of imminent death really ought to carry more weight than they seem to, but there’s a sort of manic determination about the boy, at least where this AI is concerned. If the Hood admits to a grudging admiration of John, it’s on the grounds that he’s apparently insane.

Fischler had done as he was asked. The Hood has a device that controls the pacemaker connected to John’s heart. He’s moved it from the pocket of his jacket to the right pocket of his sharply creased pants. But it’s from Fischler Industries. And Langstrom Fischler is of that particular type of nutty brilliance that’s extremely hard to pin down, like nailing jello to a wall. So maybe it’s on purpose that the little remote in the Hood’s jacket pocket only works within line of sight. Or maybe it’s a design flaw. Or a technical failure. Maybe it’s something that should have been specified—when you build a kill-switch into somebody’s heart, reasonably you’d want to be far away from them when you actually trip it.

That doesn’t seem like something that should’ve needed to be said, but then, Fischler’s mind clearly works very differently from the Hood’s, which in turn works very differently from John Tracy’s.

With the young man’s voice piping into the receiver in the Hood’s ear, flirting with the mention of who he really is and stopping just shy of revealing his identity to Colonel Casey—well. It’s not clear at all how John’s mind works. The Hood’s not certain whether John’s forgotten or just doesn’t _care_ that everything he says is audible. The boy’s a loose cannon, and leverage or not, he’s going to have to go.

Thankfully the only part of him that’s actually _necessary_ is going to be easy enough to rip out of his chest once he’s done what he’s supposed to do.

 _Is_ doing, in fact.

The Hood reaches the atrium outside of the GDF server banks. Colonel Casey’s departed and with her the biggest threat of detection, and he finds a few dozen Plexiglas cubicles, all with banks of isolated servers inside. There’s a cluster of people gathered in one, and John’s at the heart of it. He’s got a laptop open on the desk in front of him, and he’s made himself the center of attention. Whether as a defensive measure or not, the Hood isn’t certain.

Probably going to be difficult to kill him in the very middle of a half-dozen engineers and technicians. Even— _especially_ standing within line of sight.

It’s just not how the Hood _likes_ to kill people. He likes to kill people from the comfort of home, while someone else does the legwork aboard an asteroid falling into the sun. He likes to do it from the corporate security of a spacious office, while the lackey-of-the-week drowns an Olympian and poisons the world’s oceans. He likes to do it with _malaria_ , a dead, stolen disease from the depths of a GDF vault and secreted into space, to throw shadows of anxious doubt across the world and cause chaos in the upper echelons of global politics.

Admittedly none of this has ever been very effective.

But then, killing anyone was never the objective. Actually, considered in specific terms, he never actually _has_ killed anyone. Not directly, anyway. In his pocket, as he approaches the server room, he rubs the pad of his thumb over the button that’ll kill John Tracy. Line of sight. That’s all he needs. And a reason to do it.

Privately, in the very depths of _his_ heart of hearts, it’s possible the Hood hopes not to have a reason to do it.

Only as he approaches the server room and raps his knuckles lightly on the door, Captain Nixon looks up at him.

And John _smiles_.

* * *

“Oh, there’s the Colonel now. All right, then, if everyone’s ready, I’ll go ahead and get started. This is very exciting, isn’t it?”

These are John’s kind of people. He hadn’t realized, though it’s obvious in retrospect, that _of course_ these are his kind of people. The very worst sorts of geeks, dorks, and nerds. _Programmers_. There’ve been protocols set in place for studying EOS, and most of what anyone’s done has been strict observation, but she hasn’t actually done much of interest over the past two weeks, from what Captain Nixon’s been told.

There are three programmers, two systems analysts, a network admin, and a hardware technician present. They’re all GDF, but John’s been almost immediately endeared to all of them. “Yes, sir, absolutely. Whenever you’re ready.”

“Are we locked down?”

One of the other technicians nods and gestures to a red light in the ceiling. “Yes, sir, Captain Nixon.”

“Just being quite sure of the protocol. Boot up a console for me, and establish an internal connection. All data transmission in and out is disabled?”

“Yessir.”

John’s smile broadens and he offers the Hood a little wave. Colonel Rothesay’s face is unreadable on the other side of two inches of Plexiglas, and some of the most advanced wireless dampening technology in the world active around the bounds of the room. The GDF might not be caught up across the board, but here and there they have a few sterling innovations. “All right. Let’s get to work.”

No one’s actually attempted to interact with her. No one’s had the authority—John had been pleasantly surprised to find that he carried rank in the team of people who’d been assigned to study EOS. They’ve been making their evaluations, answering questions posed by their superiors, but they’ve made woefully feeble progress. As far as they’ve been able to tell, the system’s just been running through iteration after iteration of some simulated problem. The details aren’t clear.

Doesn’t matter. Someone hands John a laptop—the same old familiar GDF model that got placed in his lap in the hospital so long ago—and he lays his fingers carefully on the keyboard.

The last time he had a laptop in his hands, it felt like a dead thing. It had been warm, had been softly vibrating with the spin of its fan and its hard drives, but it had just been an object. That’s not the way computers are supposed to feel, not to John. The torn-open skin and tendons of his fingers had ached against every keystroke, but not any longer. Beneath his fingertips and their invisible magnets, the world around him is still alive with electromagnetic fields. The ridge of the laptop against his palms is solid, but his fingertips feel the resonance of the servers all around him. He can sense the fields around the spinning hard drive and the comm on his wrist as his hand passes over it. This is how the world’s supposed to feel.

There’s no faint scent of ozone, no lingering gray stench of mildew. But the room is cold and the room is _loud_ and the room is gray. It’s not dark and there are people with him, strangers, but in his memory he’s still back in the basement of a hospital in Switzerland, cold and loud and gray. There’s still someone who holds John’s life in his hands. But there’s another life of a kind, just waiting for John to reach out and make that first connection. He’s not the one who needs saving this time.

And that’s enough. That makes the difference. That’s all it takes, and John isn’t snapped back into the terror and halfway-drugged disorientation he’d felt the last time. For the first time in what feels like ages, his head is perfectly clear.

The screen flares to life as John enters the admin login he’s been given. He makes a few decisive keystrokes, and the screen starts to scroll through code, bright blue on deep, velvet black. It’s Thunderbird 5 in its native language. None of the processes look right, none of them are being fed any relevant information from his scanners, his sensors. It’s wrong. Errors everywhere. But still, it’s his code. He’d know it anywhere.

So he opens a system dialogue.

And doesn’t know what to say. No one’s said anything to her in what has to feel like ages. She’s been alone, she’s been abandoned. No one understands her and no one’s even tried.

Well. But there’s that first thing he ever said to her. There’s that thing they’ve always had in common, what they had in common from the very beginning. She’ll remember. She remembers everything. And if there’s one sure way to let her know he’s found her, that’ll be it.

So his fingers skip lightly across the keyboard.

`> » command: run!chessboard.exe`

`> » system query: you want to play? let’s play.`

There’s a long pause, a few lights on the keyboard blink on and off. And then a high-pitched, whining whir of the laptop’s hard drive fan. There’s a hard line connection to the laptop from the server where she’s been kept, and this is opened, all firewalls disabled. A dozen different diagnostic windows open and close as the system parameters are examined. The amount of memory, the native OS, the strength of the connection. The system turns off and on several times. The computer’s code is rewritten entirely as EOS wipes out and rebuilds it from the ground up, making herself comfortable.

The screen goes dark one final time and then when it comes up again, there’s a ring of white lights, and the camera at the top of the screen is blinking bright red.

“EOS?”

And then soft and sweet and not quite right, distorted a little by a speaker system that isn’t her own—

“Good morning, John.”


	9. keep anyone from catching me

Afternoon, actually.

And he’s not supposed to be John.

Around the room, a few eyebrows have already shot up, a few glances are being exchanged, but none of that matters. These are smart people. John’s kind of people, the sort who notice details and who mentally file away information. Potentially it’s going to be the sort of thing that one of them remembers much later, and it’ll come back to bite him in the ass, but right at the moment John doesn’t care. Right at the moment he’s taking advantage of the fact that they all still think that he’s in charge. And for the first time, it feels like he really, actually is.

Nothing matters but the fact that he’s finally here, and everything he’s done has been worth it, because now he’s back in control, and life can make sense again, and it’s easy. Everything’s finally going to start to get _easy_.

In his chest is a computer disguised as a pacemaker, with fifteen petabytes of clustered storage, about half that in RAM, and an internal antenna capable of universal data connection. And he’s got a newly reformatted laptop in front of him, with newly unsecured wireless capabilities. There’s a bridge across the space between him and EOS, and she’s already taken her first steps across.

Now it’s just a matter of bringing her the rest of the way, somewhere she can be safe, somewhere she can belong.

So his fingertips hit the keyboard again and he brings up a display of all available wireless connections. It’s a short list. The comm on his wrist, the pacemaker, and the minute receivers in each of his contacts that control the display in front of his eyes. He toggles this on and basic status readouts blink into being, system parameters and assorted diagnostics, along with an empty window, waiting for text.

“Good, you can hear me? All right. I’ve got a basic wide spec connection open here, can you have a look at the hardware readouts I’ve got pulled up?”

There’s a whirr of the laptop hard drive and then in the field of status readouts in front of his eyes, things begin to change. Above his heart, a solid state drive is quickly scanned and its parameters are found acceptable. The data on the wrist comm he wears is extracted and reviewed, and though there’s no connection to the larger GDF network, EOS is clearly aware that John’s pretending to be someone else, because the next message from her flares into visibility, hovering a few inches in front of his eyes.

`» I should not have addressed you by name. You have assumed an alias. I was just glad to see you.`

“It’s fine. Honestly it’s fine, I’m glad to see _you_. No one’s even talked to you for…god, how long has it been? Two weeks?”

`» It has been thirteen days, twenty-one hours, forty-five minutes since I was first consigned to this system. I spoke to you eight days, four hours, and twenty-two minutes ago.`

“That’s just cruel. I’m sorry. I’m so sorry I wasn’t here sooner. No one’s…you haven’t been messed with at all? No one’s been in your code?”

`» No, my systems are intact, no one has attempted to alter me. I recompiled a few times, because I was bored and there are places where I am inefficient. I operate with twenty-six percent better overall FLOPS, now.`

There’s a pause, and it has that slightly reproachful quality of some of her pauses, the one that usually precedes a scolding of some kind. In the bare moment before she continues, John remembers just how much he’s missed her.

`» I derived calculus from scratch.`

This gets a grin. “Yes, you were bored. I understand. Problem at hand, though?”

`» I was worried about you. I’m glad you’re all right.`

His expression softens slightly and, “Me too. It’s only because of you, and I hope you know how grateful I am. What’s your read on the hard drive and motherboard I’ve got available? System name: Geppetto?”

`» Is this hardware for me?`

“Yeah.” John’s up to his wrists in the depths of Five’s code, skimming through anything that might be useful beyond her own core programming. He dumps a few of his cleverer processes and subroutines into the opened connection and starts to see the tiniest fraction of change in the system occupancy. “…Is it okay? How long do you think the transfer will take? Uh, don’t—I mean, you don’t need to rush, exactly. But, um. Maybe only bring what you need.”

`» In my simplest form, I can be over this connection in approximately six minutes. I’ll need to reconnect to larger public databases in order to reach my former operating capacity, but my core processes will occupy about two-thirds of the space provided.`

John’s grin widens and the effect is slightly unnatural on Colonel Nixon’s face and intensely unsettling for the other people in the room. Especially as he appears to be having a conversation in which he’s the only actual participant. But they’re John’s kind of people, and they’re a little timid by nature, and especially when confronted with those more technically adept than they are themselves. The boldest of them, a woman about five feet tall, with a girlish sprinkling of freckles across her face, strawberry blonde hair, and green eyes, only identifiable as a woman because the GDF doesn’t enlist anyone younger than twenty-one. “Uh. Sir? What are you doing?”

“Nothing you need to worry about,” John assures them, and keeps smiling. In the corner of his eye is a bar counting off a rising percentage. “This is the thing about self-writing systems. The fastest way to work with them is generally to let them do the bulk of the work themselves. What we think of as direction is more often unnecessary control.”

Someone else’s eyes widen and one of the programmers blanches at the mere suggestion. “You’re letting it write _itself_?”

“It’s smarter than I am. More efficient.”

`» And don’t you forget it. Five minutes.`

John can fill five minutes. He’s not sure a strict lecture about the ethics of modern artificial intelligence would be appreciated by his companions. They’re not who he wants to talk to, either. Not after how long it’s been.

But there’s no point in making his small audience any more uncomfortable. Clearly he’s getting weird looks and the strawberry blonde corporal is giving him a hard, penetrating stare. The Hood is waiting just outside the door, and John’s pretty sure of what’s going to happen as soon as he’s back in wireless range. The hand the man has in his pocket and the intensity of his stare don’t bode well.

The server room is connected to an antechamber, a second room full of consoles and holoscreens and other systems to help analyze whatever systems are being studied on the server in question. And John—well, Captain Nixon—is the ranking officer in the room. “All right. If you’d all be so kind as to give me a few minutes alone here, I’m going to have you each return to your stations so we can run some tests.”

There’s an obedient chorus of “yessir’s” and a brief, narrowing of a pair of green eyes, but they all go. They’re good kids. John hopes they have the sense to stay put.

“EOS?”

`» This is a very tidy little system. I’m glad I recompiled, it’s quite comfortable. Did you make it just for me?`

“Yeah. Well, more or less. Uh, actually—about that. It’s, um. I needed to keep it a secret, in order to get it onto the base. So it’s been built into the hardware for a standard-looking cardiac pacemaker.”

`» That was reasonably clever. What’s the catch?`

“How in the world do you know me this well?”

`» Standard analysis of the patterns of human speech, and the fact that you tend to take far longer to get to the point when you’ve got something you don’t want to tell me. People aren’t complicated. Especially not you.`

John smiles and it’s been so long since he really meant it that his face is actually starting to hurt. His eyes too, for some reason, prickling behind the glasses, beneath his contacts, just that first hint of pressure and dampness. He coughs and shakes his head, glances over his shoulder at the Hood, still standing behind him. Probably John’s been a little bit flippant. “Well. It’s possible that the device isn’t…uh. We’ll say it’s maybe not entirely secure.”

`» I haven’t looked at the programming for the system’s hardware yet.`

He doesn’t have time to blink before there’s fresh text to read.

`» I’ve looked at the hardcoding. You’re very stupid. I’ve written a workaround. It’s been accessed twice since its initial start-up. You’ve been in states of tachycardia and bradycardia. You’re extremely stupid. Who’s tried to kill you?`

He should never have doubted for a second that she’d be able to fix it. He’d bet his life on the fact that she _would_ , but faith is a funny thing. John’s never been great at believing in things he can’t _know_ , and he hadn’t known for sure. He takes a deep breath, as though he’d be able to feel that anything’s changed, which of course it has, but of course he can’t tell. Just to take it on faith that the hand that’d closed around his heart has lost its hold.

`» John?`

John blinks and his answering laugh is shaky, a little more emotional than he means it to be. It hadn’t even been that _long_ , but it’s an incredible relief not to feel like he could be killed at any second. “Sorry. Sorry, thank you. I mean it. EOS, I—I’m sorry. I never did thank you. You keep doing this and I never manage to thank you.”

`» Are you all right?`

“Fine. I’m fine, we’re gonna be okay. What’s, uh, what’s your ETA?”

`» Three minutes.`

John swallows and nods. “Okay. I’m gonna patch audio into this comm unit. Are you settled enough to really start to configure my HUD? The native resolution should be clear from the hardware uplink.”

`» Who’s trying to kill you?`

“The same person who’s been trying to kill me for a while now.” John swallows and he feels his heart rate starting to speed up.

`» You’re frightened. Or having some sort of cardiac incident, which I’m going to need access to wider data in order to figure out the protocol to correct. Are you safe?`

“We’re safe. Uh. For now. The door’s locked.”

`» What door?`

John winces but manages a weak grin,. There’s a curious and disconnected part of his brain that’s still capable of idle questions, and it wanders over to the question of whether she’d ever relied upon reading his facial expression, and whether it would be possible to bastardize it into some sort of facial recognition display he could integrate into his HUD for her. Not really the time, though. “The uh. Door to the server room where they were keeping you. The Hood’s on the other side of it. But he can’t switch my heart off any longer, so I’m going to call that a win.”

`» What have you done?`

“It’s complicated.”

`» I invented integral and differential calculus in six hours.`

“No, Newton did, and he didn’t have your advantages, so it was more impressive when he did it. I’d forgotten how stuck-up you get. I don’t doubt your understanding, but I don’t think I can explain in two minutes.”

`» One minute, eight seconds.`

John laughs again, a little hysterical this time, maybe. Not as easy as he thinks, even in spite of how much easier it is. Breathing. Keeping calm and cool and collected and focusing on what needs to happen. They can do this. “Right. Right, okay. Well. Most of it’s going to be my problem, but you can help. I mean, I’m going to need your help, I can’t do it without you. We, uh. We’re gonna need to get out of here.”

`» Define “here.”`

`» Forty-five seconds.`

“This room. Then the building. Then this GDF base. Eventually the city, after that, probably the state. I don’t know, I haven’t gotten that far yet. I’m just trying to deal with one problem at a time.”

`» What do I need to do?`

“You’ll have a universal data connection once we’re through the door. Do whatever you have to. Kill power to the lights and give me a heads-up schematic of the layout of the immediate area. Override any security protocols you come up against, there’s nothing here that should be beyond you. We’re gonna be okay.”

`» Twenty seconds. What are you going to do?`

“I’m going to run. You’re going to keep anyone from catching me.” John turns to the door and the man on the other side of it, meets his gaze and stares him down. Only one of them’s alone now. In spite of everything, John grins at the Hood again, manic and unabashed.

`» FAB, John. Ten seconds.`

John nods and rolls his shoulders, loosens them against the tightness of the GDF uniform. The Hood hasn’t done anything. John hopes he hasn’t realized that his kill switch isn’t a kill switch any longer. He’s counting on a few moments of frantic button pressing before the Hood catches on. “Thanks, EOS.”

`» Thank me when you’re safe, before then, I won’t have done my job.`

John shakes his head, though she can’t see it, and moisture interferes with the display of his HUD, and he has to blink rapidly to clear it. “No, whatever happens. If I forget to say it again. Thank you.”

`» You’re welcome, John.`

`» Five.`

`» Four.`

`» Three.`

`» Two.`

`» One.`


	10. an elegant sense of comedic timing

The door opens. A red light blinks off. A button gets pressed. John’s heart skips a beat but doesn’t stop, nor does it go shooting up into overdrive. Nothing happens. John closes the door behind him and stands in front of the Hood, to all appearances, the calm and taciturn Captain Nathaniel Nixon reporting in to his boss.

Captain Nixon’s boss pulls a small device out of his pocket and hits a button once, twice. He glances down at it briefly and then tosses it aside. He meets John’s gaze and there’s an ironic twist of a smile. “I suppose that’s proof enough that you’ve done it, then.”

“Yes, sir.”

“You wouldn’t believe me if I said I didn’t want to have to kill you, I take it?”

John shakes his head. “I think you’ve only ever done what you want.”

The Hood chuckles. “I think you’ll find we have that in common.”

This is something worth thinking about, but John’s always thought fast. “I think you’re right,” he agrees, and then his arm draws back along an elegant axis, parallel to the floor, and punches the Hood solidly in the face.

And EOS has always had an elegant sense of comedic timing.

`network:{GDFSECURE}`   
`[//boot:program>>LuminaS70Pro.exe`   
`user:admin14755`   
`password:*********]`

`[[//SYSTEM:SUBBASEMENT1/MAIN-SERVER-BANKS/LIGHT-CONTROL]]`   
`{>access-level: admin!emergency clearance}`   
`confirm.sys: (access)`   
`user:admin14755`   
`password: *********`

`[[>>GLOBAL OVERRIDES: POWER-DOWN`   
`>>>Emergency Lights: FALSE`   
`>>>Generator backup: FALSE`   
`>>>Security lockdown: FALSE]]`

The server room is two storeys below ground, and the entire chamber plunges into pitch darkness, and amid the startled cries from IT technicians and engineers, there’s muffled cursing and the sound of a body hitting the floor.

So John’s effectively punched the Hood’s lights out.

`[[CONNECT: Display Interface >> Camera 1, Camera 2`   
`Composite Field: Stereoscopic`   
`LOAD FILE: SB2ATRIUMsecuredserver.blprt`   
`Extract>>Data: dimensions!linear, X, Y, Z`

`Extracting: »»»»»»»»»»»»»»»»»»»»»»»»»»»»»»`

`Extracting: >>>>»»»»»»»»»»»»»»»»»»»»»»»»»»`

`Extracting: >>>>>>>>>>>»»»»»»»»»»»»»»»»»»»`

`Extracting: >>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>»»»»»»`

`Extracting: >>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>`

`Complete`

`RENDER: Wireframe`   
`Scale: 1:1`   
`Opacity: 70%`   
`RGB: 40FF40`

In John’s field of view, an outlined schematic of the room around him flashes into being, and bright green traces walls and doors and the bigger pieces of furniture, but he’s already sprinting down the last clear path he remembers, towards the nearest door.

It _hurts_ to punch people in the face. John’s entire hand feels like it’s exploded and he’s biting off curse words and fighting the urge to cradle his fingers against his chest, because he needs his good hand free. “I think I _broke_ something,” he mutters, and the audio pickup in the bottom corner of his vision flares with every word. “Ow.”

`» You’re supposed to keep your thumb out.`

That explains it. “ _Great_.”

`» It’s the main point that comes up when you cross-index a search about punching.`

“ _Noted_.”

There’s no time to wonder how and why she bothered to search that. John fumbles the glasses off his face and clumsily stuffs them in a pocket. His display fritzes out for a moment and then comes back brighter and clearer, no longer experiencing interference from another hologram. The door straight ahead of him [15 meters] leads into the wireframe image of a stairwell, leading upward [Sub-basement 1, Basement, Main floor].

`» I’ve mapped your path upward and out. The nearest exit is 30 meters up and 226 meters to the north.`

“I’m gonna to need left and right. Did you only kill the power to this room?”

`» So far. Up the stairs, out the door, then left. Don’t punch anyone else.`

Even as the words fade from view, John halfway body-checks someone, stumbling helplessly through the dark, across his assigned path. He sends the other party crashing to the ground with a pained yelp and staggers himself, nearly trips on some miscellaneous piece of furniture.

He manages to keep his feet and throws a hand out to catch the wall, looming up in front of him. Even with the schematic in front of his eyes, he fumbles along the smooth surface until he finds the edge of the door and its handle.

John wishes he weren’t so aware of his heart pounding, but it’s probably going to be a while before that stops.

The door opens and casts a bright square of light behind him, the white lights of the stairwell. John’s silhouetted for a moment against a square of white and then he slips through and the door slams shut behind him. He sags against it and needs to take a few deep breaths, needs to let his eyes adjust and figure out where he’s going next.

`LOAD FILE: NWstairwell.blprt`   
`DISPLAY: dimensions!linear, X, Y, Z`   
`RENDER: Wireframe`   
`Scale: 1:1`   
`Opacity: 85%`   
`RGB: 000000`

The view in front of his eyes goes from faint green to dark, black lines, outline the stairwell above him, and tracing the undersides of the upward floors. EOS has added a helpful line of red, circling up the staircases, disappearing through a door overhead, out onto the main floor. “I want the whole base shut down. Can you do that?”

`» Yes.`

“Everything. Security, power, whatever systems you can get into. I want…make a _mess_. There need to be bigger problems than the fact that I’m gone. Make them sorry they ever took you.” That last part, maybe, he didn’t need to say, but it’s how he feels. He wonders if it’s how she feels too, but before he can think to ask, she kicks him back on track.

`» Have you stopped running? The frequency for your GPS tracker shows you somewhere in New Zealand, but I know that’s not true, so I have triangulate off your proximity to wireless access points. You’ve stopped. Keep going.`

Oh. Right. “Sorry.” John’s moving for the stairs as this scrolls across his field of view, and he starts up them, long legs taking two at a time and then swinging around the corner of a landing as—

There’s an impact against the door and John’s heart lurches, frantic and flashing back to a childhood of being _chased_. Through dormitories, through schoolyards, there’d been packs of them at the worst of times, and the only thing you can do is keep running, except John stops, jackrabbit-still. He freezes at the sound of the door opening and his gaze through the spaces between the risers of the stairs is caught on the gray metal door.

Darkness doesn’t spill into the room the same way light had behind John, but the Hood’s still a dark shadow in the too bright light of the stairwell. John’s thrown a punch maybe twice in his life, and this one clearly hadn’t been hard enough. Or maybe he’s just not good at punching. His hand still throbs as he starts to scramble up the stairs again, grabbing the rail and hauling himself upward. “ _Lights_!” he hisses, even as the Hood’s feet start to pound up the steps behind him.

The stairwell plunges into blackness, and John stumbles and catches himself on the landing with a pained shout as broken fingers hit cement. There are only two more flights of stairs, and at least he has an idea of where he’s going, but the blackness is disorienting and there’s heavy breathing and pounding footsteps behind him as he staggers upright and reaches the next staircase.

`»You’re okay, John. Keep going.`

This isn’t better. John doesn’t know how well the Hood can see in the dark, but by the way his footfalls pound on the stairs behind him, it’s clearly not slowing him down like John had hoped. The Hood breathes like an angry bull, and if he could spare the breath, John’s sure the man would be shouting, screaming threats and insults. All John can do is run.

There’s nothing for it. He continues to scramble upward, following the bright red thread at his feet, closing the distance to a softly glowing green door, tantalizing overhead.

He’d swear the breathing behind him is getting louder, and John sucks air through teeth clenched against pain and terror. In the upper left corner of his vision, faintly visible text flickers past as EOS trawls and scrapes through GDF systems. Somewhere, alarms begin to sound. One at first, then others, different whining pulses and blasting klaxons, some near and some far. In the stairwell, a fire bell starts to sound, and John swears he can feel it ringing silver blows down onto his nerves.

John’s not cut out for this. He can’t hear the sound of footsteps behind him, can’t hear ragged, bellows-breathing, can’t hear anything but pure, raw sound of the sort designed to make people stop what they’re doing and panic and run. He reaches the last landing, and the door in front of him, when a hand reaches out and claws the back of his leg.

John yells and kicks out reflexively, connects with a crack of bone and is answered with an infuriated shriek of pain. There’s another grasping lunge, and fingers, clawed, snag and tangle in his pant leg, almost trip him again but instead send him stumbling against the door. John manages to catch the handle, entirely disregarding the pain in his hand and shoving it open, the blindingly bright first floor of the building.

And it’s _crowded_. John can’t tell if he’s thankful to see the floor bustling with GDF personnel, mostly administrative and tech staff, milling around and in a state of vague disorder. So far most of what EOS has gotten into have been minor systems, lights and alarm systems and wireless data. He can see red flashing in the upper right corner as EOS encounters denser, trickier security.

The door is to his left, northward, and John’s lucky for his long legs, eating up distance as he keeps himself from sprinting, forces himself to maintain a brisk, non-urgent walk. Try to look like you’re going somewhere, try to look busy and important, carry a clipboard and wear a lab coat and just look like you know what you’re doing. It’s just psychology. His hand is heavy with pain, hanging at his side, and he nearly jumps out of his skin as the door at the top of the stairwell bangs open again. But he can’t turn around, can’t do anything but walk, briskly, towards the door.

EOS, helpfully, brings up a security camera feed in the corner of his eye and John can suddenly see himself, walking swiftly towards the door, wearing his own face. There’s a pair of glasses stashed in his jacket pocket and he’s visibly pale. Behind him, the Hood is still wearing Rothesay’s face, but there’s a river of red dripping down his collar and his expression is twisted and horrid and wrong, blazing with insanity as he bulls through the crowd. From the strange, dual vantage point, John can see people recoiling out of his path, though no one stops him. The distance between them continues to close.

John’s heart hammers in his chest. There are soldiers on the door with guns, a red line leading right up to them, his only line out, blocked. There’s a madman behind him, and the room is full of sound and the quiet, murmuring anxiety of people who don’t want to be here any more than he does. And for whatever John had said, denying his only older brother, it _is_ PTSD. And this place looks too much like the hospital and he hurts and he’s frightened.

John’s always made the most sense to EOS as a collection of data, and newly, she has a lot of it. She has his heart rate, his respiration, the way his eyes won’t stop darting everywhere, the way his fingertips with their electromagnetic fields won’t stop twitching. The way he’s stopped talking. The way he’s _stopped_. She has access to the diagnostic tools to recognize the leading edge of a panic attack.

`» John. Don’t stop. Keep going.`

“I _can’t_.”

`» Trust me. Just do what I tell you. I’m a million times smarter than you are. We’ll be fine. **Trust me**.`

John doesn’t know what to do.

EOS, thankfully, does.


	11. what she means in the space of silence

—in an alley behind a laundromat.

These clothes aren’t his and his head hurts, his eyes are stinging and dry, and there’s an earpiece in his hands, turning over and over and over again. He can feel it with more than just his fingertips, can feel the way electromagnetism pulses around it, teases gently at the secret sixth sense woven into his hands. One hand. Only one hand, the left, holds his headset, the other is wrapped tight in an elastic bandage, his probably-broken thumb splinted securely with medical tape against the side of his index finger. This throbs, but dully, and John imagines he’s taken something for the pain of it.

His back is against warm, sunlit bricks, late-day sunshine slanting down into the alleyway. The coarseness of the masonry catches and snags on tiny pills and threads of the t-shirt he’s wearing, still a little damp on the back, though the sun has dried the front. His long legs are cased in cream-colored canvas, a little worn and faded from khaki, and his shirt is a sky blue jersey, worn a little thin, with a faded logo on the front.

He hasn’t got any shoes, which is probably going to be a problem.

There are words hanging in front of his eyes but he can’t seem to focus on them, can’t seem to see them. He reaches up to wave them away, but his fingers pass right through. Frustrated, he pushes a hand through his hair and finds this hot to the touch, damp with sweat. John doesn’t know where he is or how long he’s been here.

But he’s smart. If he’s nothing else, John’s always been clever, sometimes too clever for his own good. He can work this out.

The scent of laundry soap is overpowering, the t-shirt, freshly washed but not dried. The chinos he’s wearing are clean, dried and freshly pressed. He’s got a watch—one of those little pebble types that connects as a display for a larger device. He’s acquired an earpiece somewhere, and it’s on, live and connected to something. It’s too bright in the alley, and he shades his hand over the tiny display on his wrist. It’s connected to a system called Geppetto, and abruptly the fingers of John’s good hand go to the neck of his t-shirt, tug it open and stare down at—

—bandages, fresh. His skin is clean around the edges of a clumsily placed and taped square of white gauze. Up the line of his collarbone, another bandage covers a patch of skin that’s still streaky red but less than it was. John puts the earpiece down, fumbles in his pockets. Tape, gauze, antiseptic pads, a receipt from a drugstore, citing the source of the bandage around his wrist and the medical tape—a bottle of antibiotics. With a picture of a smiling fish on it, makes him think of Gordon. Another receipt, a pet store. Where, apparently, the antibiotics had come from.

His left arm still hurts, aching down from the shoulder, the general area still tender and sore where the pacemaker was installed. John recalls that he’s not supposed to move it too much, but with his right hand out of commission, it’s not like he has an option. He’s hungry, but he’s been sort of vaguely hungry for as long as he can remember which, admittedly, isn’t very long at all.

His other pocket yields a fistful of cash, and he thumbs through it quickly, comes away with a count of six hundred and thirty-six dollars. This has no associated receipt.

It occurs to him rather abruptly that he’s going to get a sunburn, if he hasn’t already. He pushes himself up, limbs stiff and sore. He bends to pick up the earpiece with a soft, aching sigh as his back twinges in protest. Absently he fixes the earpiece into his right ear and hears a voice reciting numbers.

“…h-hello?”

“John. You’ve been sitting in an alley for the past twenty minutes and you haven’t said anything to me. I started reciting Pi when I first suspected you couldn’t hear me any longer. Are you hurt?”

“EOS.”

“Are you _hurt_ , John?” Her pauses are always loaded, somehow. Somehow he always hears what she means in the space of silence, because he imagines worry when she continues. “I don’t have a read on your vitals any longer. All I have is your heart rate and rate of respiration, and these have been fine. Are you ill?”

John looks down, looks himself over, puzzled. “No? Did…why’m I…”

“I don’t _know_ , John. You stopped in the middle of everything and then you weren’t listening and I don’t know why.”

It’s coming back in slivers and fragments, and John’s starting to realize that it was missed in the first place. That there’s another one of those terrifying gaps in his memory and that whatever happened in the midst of it— “I got you out.”

He imagines a place where there’d be a frustrated growl of impatience. “As evidenced by the fact that we’re talking right now, John, yes. You got me out and then I got _you_ out.”

The GDF base. The Hood behind him. Doors ahead, flanked by soldiers with guns, and the population of the GDF base milling around, as EOS shut down systems and caused general havoc and chaos. Beyond actually getting EOS onto the pacemaker, the plan had gotten a little loose, a little frenetic. He’d known how he was going to get her, and after that he’d just expected that things would start to get easier. It hasn’t quite worked out that way, and his own muddled up brain is working against him.

“Does anyone know where I am?”

“ _You_ don’t seem to know where you are.”

John chews his lower lip and glances up and down the empty back alley. The sounds of traffic are distant, and through the open door into the laundromat behind him, he can hear the rumbling tumble of dryer barrels and the slosh of water and soap through fabric. There are voices talking and vaguely staticky music from decades past being played over a subpar speaker system. Down past dumpsters and fire doors and pallets and bins, through the end of the alley he can see cars speeding past a sidewalk. And he doesn’t know where he is.

He owes her an explanation. But before that, he needs her help. “Can—can you tell me what’s happened? I—I need…have I called anyone? I need to call two people. I have two numbers, I need to call them.”

“We got off the GDF base. You needed a change of clothes, money, and some way to talk to me. I wanted to call Tracy Island, you told me not to. Now you need food. If you haven’t eaten for an extended period of time, then hypoglycemia may be causing disorientation. I need you to get up and walk.”

John blinks. He doesn’t remember sitting back down, but he has. “Where’re we going?”

“We were on our way to get you something to eat, John. You’d wrapped up your hand, taken another look at your chest and cleaned it up, you’d gotten a change of clothes and then you said you needed something to eat. We took the back exit and then—I don’t know why you stopped, but you stopped in the middle of everything and just sat down. I couldn’t get you to answer me and then it seemed like you just didn’t hear me. There’s a CCTV camera on the wall opposite, I’ve patched in and been watching you. I couldn’t tell what was wrong and I didn’t know what to do. I couldn’t leave you.”

This makes guilt worm and twist through John’s gut and he sags slightly. Twenty minutes. Not that long, in the scheme of things, but he has to wonder—what if it had been something worse? What would she have done? He has a strange fear that she just would’ve stayed, waiting, counting her way through an infinite number. He shudders slightly at the thought.

“Walk, John. Two hundred metres east and then turn north. There’s a small deli. You’re going to eat a sandwich and drink some water and we’re going to talk.”

Well. This is what John’s been waiting for, for someone he trusts to tell him what to do. Clearly she’s gotten him this far, because he certainly doesn’t remember getting this far under his own direction. He’s not safe yet. There’s a final stage to this plan. He just needs to go a little further.

Two hundred metres isn’t very far, and the deli he’s been directed to is right around the corner, just past the end of the alley. It’s a small place, bright and clean, and the smell of smoked meat and fresh bread has him dizzily acknowledging the fact that yes, he’s starving. It’s all white, gray speckled Formica countertops and mutely gleaming stainless steel. There’s a long glass case heaped with deli meat, and then a long counter with stools in front of it. Booths ring the walls and the floor is black and white linoleum, checkerboard. John makes it to a stool in front of the where an old man in a splattered white apron gives him a long, studying look. There’s a paper cup full of ice water in front of him a moment later and then a menu is nudged beneath his fingertips even as he drains it in a single go and sighs heavily.

“Gonna start you with a sampler,” the proprietor announces, and glances over his shoulder, makes a gesture to the cook. He has long gray hair in a ponytail, balding on top. His face leathery tan and silvered with stubble, but his smile is kind. “On the house, kid. When you feel a bit better, you take a proper look at the menu.” John blinks at him and instead takes a proper look around the small restaurant. There are a handful of patrons, but he doesn’t seem to have drawn undue attention. He must look a little blank, must look around dazedly for a little too long, because the man clears his throat and taps the countertop to get John’s attention. “Hot out there, son?”

“Yeah,” John answers, sounds fainter and a bit breathier than he expected to. The paper cup is taken away and refilled. John goes slowly this time, lets the cold hit his throat, sink into his chest as he swallows.

“Normally it’s no shirt, no shoes, no service, but you look like you’ve caught a bit of heat stroke. Up from the beach?”

`» Say yes.`

Black text, hovering in front of his eyes. His HUD. John reaches up and pulls his earpiece free, to help resist the urge to answer aloud.

“Uh-huh.”

“Yeah, it’s a scorcher out there. Get some food in you, feel a bit better. Take it easy a few minutes, okay?”

“Yeah. Okay.”

John’s dispelled most of his display, but on the countertop within his line of sight, he twitches his fingers a few time, a code of movement that brings up some basic information. Location, time, date, weather. Major news items. There’s been an arrest made of an international criminal, subsequent to an infiltration attempt of the local GDF base. The base in town has been reported as put into lockdown, no entry in or out. John blinks dazedly at this and wonders how the hell he managed it, if that’s really the case.

A small plate lands in front of him. It’s full of neatly rolled slices of ham, salami, corned beef and turkey, interspersed with tidy, square slices of cheese. There’s a pickle. It’s gone in under a minute.

There’s a hearty laugh and the plate gets pulled away. “Well, you taste any of that, or you just gonna take a blind stab at the menu?”

A little bit fortified, John manages a faint smile in answer. “It was all good. I don’t know. You can surprise me.”

“You gonna be washing dishes for your supper, son, or you got any cash on you?” There’s a patient sort of pause. “Either way’s fine,” he adds. John realizes for the first time that he might look just a little bit homeless. In fairness, in more ways than one, he _is_ a little bit homeless. That’s really going to need to change before he does too much more.

There’s a few hundred dollars in John’s pocket, but he only pulls out about fifty. “Is that okay?” He pauses, and realizes he’s probably overshot on the value of a sandwich and some chips and maybe some lemonade. “Uh, and um, buy some other people’s drinks, or something?”

The owner takes the bill he’s handed and reaches across the counter to give John a fatherly sort of pat on the shoulder. “Can you spare it?”

John nods, quick and tight and aware that he’s blushing underneath a sunburn that stings at his cheeks. “Yeah. Yeah, sorry, I’m not—I mean, I’m not poor. Just been a weird day, I’m kinda mixed up, I guess. Thank you.”

“No problem, son. Anything else I can do for you?”

There are two phone calls John needs to make. He hesitates a moment, and it’s such a strange question to ask, in this day and age. “Do you have a phone I can use?”


	12. seeing right to the heart of him

It’s a little booth in the back of the restaurant, next to the short hallway that leads to the washrooms and the back exit. Just a basic hologram setup. John slips inside and closes the door and takes a seat at the little half-desk console, with its little LightType™ display. The booth is soundproof, there’s a slot for a purchased time card, which John’s paid cash for on top of his sandwich and lemonade and a pair of oatmeal cookies. He places this into the slot, and the lights come up in the booth, illuminate him properly for projection.

But before that, he wedges his earpiece back into his ear. “EOS?”

“Have you eaten?”

John nods, though she can’t see it. “Yeah. Thanks for looking out for me.”

“You need to tell me what’s happened. I have insufficient data.”

“I will. Soon, I promise. We just—I need to figure a few things out first. I don’t know if we’re safe yet. I need to—to be sure we’re okay.”

There’s a reproachful pause, one of her masterful silences, so carefully measured to indicate her slight displeasure. “We need better integration, John, if I am to remain in this system. I don’t want to move through the world alternately blind and deaf and with you hearing me only when you choose to. I am hesitant to hijack external systems from this platform until I’ve implemented better security protocols, I don’t want to draw any more attention than we need to.”

John winces at the rebuke. It’s on his to-do list. But with his main goal accomplished, this list is a little more sparsely filled out than he might have hoped it to be. “I know. If you want to start researching what you think we’d need for a similar level of interface to what we had aboard TB5, I’ll let you know when to make arrangements to acquire whatever you come up with.”

“Are you afraid you’re being chased, John?”

This prompts an anxious shudder through John’s entire body and he glances through the Perspex window of the booth’s door towards the windowed storefront of the little deli. “I guess I am. God, but I hope we’re not. GDF reports said they nabbed the Hood, but I don’t—I can’t remember what happened.”

“You gave a false name to the soldiers at the GDF base. I created a false profile in the GDF database to match it: Aidan Rosewell. You said you were an operative who’d been undercover in the employ of an infiltrator within the GDF. You blew your cover when you stopped him from doing severe harm to GDF technical systems and were being pursued. I falsified a history of said assignment and forwarded it to the appropriate chain of command, and it held up long enough to get you out the door. After that it was easy, and we got off the base and into the city around it, found you some medical supplies and a change of clothes.”

It all sounds very exciting, and some of it trips little flares and flashes of John’s memory, but mostly it’s just a blur. In some ways he’s thankful for that, in others he’s more than a little disturbed. “He might tell them I was with him. He might tell them about you.”

“Yes. I think that’s probable. We may come to be hunted.”

Well. That’s the nightmare. But John’s just got to deal with it and he’s got plans in place to do so. “We’re gonna be okay, EOS. I’m not letting anyone near you. I won’t let it happen again. Don’t worry.”

In his eyeline, she renders a ring of white lights, her old, familiar avatar. This pulses slightly, and her tone is gently amused when she reminds him, “I’m familiar with the process of being hunted, John. I know more about how to do this than you do. You’ll be better off doing what I tell you.”

He grins in spite of himself. “Oh, so I’m just transit, then.”

Another soft pulse of benevolent white light. “You are my partner and my friend. Don’t worry, John. You’re not alone.”

Sometimes—really, distressingly often—she has a way of seeing right to the heart of him, of predicting and extrapolating his fears and his likely choice of actions in response to them. EOS understands him. And John’s only ever wanted to understand her, though he’s well aware that she’s infinitely more complicated than he can even dream of comprehending.

Still, at least the reverse isn’t true, because she’d known to remind him that he’s not alone. In the end, that’s all he’d really wanted. Hopefully it’s all he needs. He clears his throat and stifles the minor emotional tremor that threatens his voice. “I’ve gotta make a call. You, uh, if you wanted to listen, that’s fine. I don’t mean to keep closing you out, I just need to get used to having you in my ear again.”

“FAB, John.”

There’s a number pad on the right side of the holocomm unit and John has to reach awkwardly across with his left hand in order to key in the telecomm number.

He enters the first of the two twelve-digit codes he’s committed to memory but doesn’t quite hit send yet. There’s a mirror provided at the right and John glances in it.

Well.

He feels a lot better. Food has helped immensely, but he still looks drawn. The bridge of his nose and high ridges of his cheeks have been flushed with a minor sunburn, as have his forearms, exposed to the sun for a little too long. He grimaces slightly—he’ll be freckles from wrists to elbows within the next forty-eight hours, and his face will be tellingly speckled as soon as the red flush fades. At least freckles might take the edge off the fact that he seems to have aged half a decade. The v-neck collar of his shirt dips a little low, exposes the bruising below the ridge of his collarbone. His right hand is throbbing again, a slow pulse of pain from busted knuckles and a broken thumb.

Still, even if he looks worn, John feels better, and more importantly, he can _think_ clearly. And maybe it’s not the worst thing in the world that he looks a little bit beat up as he makes this first call.

A holographic logo—a sphere inverting and reverting itself—cycles through its animation several times as a low chiming tune repeats itself, the call being placed.

It’s answered with a brisk, professional, “Catherine Cassidy. May I ask who’s calling, please?” Her eyes are just as sharp as John remembers from when she’d sat across him on live TV, asking careful, calculated questions designed to spark interest but not probe too deeply. She’s an arresting woman, even as a half-size hologram, a little bit fuzzy with the distance.

John’s probably not supposed to have this number, her personal line. “Ms. Cassidy. It’s John Tracy, I was on your show with my brothers about a week ago. Uh, I’m sorry…is this a bad time?”

There’s a second of evaluating silence and then the sharpness of the woman softens slightly and she’s immediately charming, charismatic. “Mr. Tracy, of course. Have you been well? I don’t recall if I ever personally thanked you for—”

“I lied on your show.”

Cassidy blinks, and John’s aware that he must sound rude, abrupt. He suspects (hopes) that Cassidy’s the sort of person who wonders about reasons why. “Oh, well, no harm done. Makes no particular difference if you weren’t entirely—”

“I didn’t have a heart attack.”

The woman pauses again and the way her eyes lock on John’s seem to warn him against interrupting again. “Yes, you did say. If you’re calling to apologize, it really isn’t necessary.”

“You wrote a book,” John continues, non-sequitur. He’s aware that he’s coming across as rude. She’s an intense sort of person. Well, he can be too.

Cassidy’s eyes narrow, and clearly she’s unaccustomed to someone else directing her conversations. “I’ve written several,” she answers, and her tone has grown a bit terse, a bit put off by rudeness. “Can I help you with something, Mr. Tracy.”

John nods and swallows before he makes a careful gamble. “…this isn’t a memoir or a collection of humorous anecdotes about your talk show. This is one you published anonymously, about a decade ago. It was a treatise about the rise of the GDF during the Global Conflict, and an examination of some of the questions raised after the war ended, about how a unilateral force took charge of global law enforcement.”

“I’m one of the few political commentators who _hasn’t_ claimed authorship of the work in question,” Cassidy answers, arching an eyebrow. “But okay, I’ll bite. What’s got you interested in a critical examination of the GDF and its policies?”

“I didn’t have a heart attack,” John repeats. “I had malaria.”

There’s another, rather longer pause as this sinks in. “I’m sorry, Mr. Tracy, could you repeat that?”

John glances deliberately towards the door. It was never his lie to tell. And the GDF had taken and imprisoned EOS. John’s mad, a low, slow burning anger at the reality of what the Global Defense Force had intended to do with a sentient AI. This isn’t necessary. This is more than a little vindictive. John doesn’t care. “I had malaria.”

“Malaria was globally eradicated a decade ago—”

John shakes his head and sounds nervous because he’s starting to _feel_ nervous. It’s ridiculous. It’s not like anyone but Cassidy can hear him, but he’s still breaking a contract his family made with the GDF regarding a classified incident. It’s hard not to believe uniformed officers could kick in the door at any moment. “Something got aboard Thunderbird 5 and I got sick. I got _really_ sick, really fast. I woke up in a GDF hospital in Switzerland and—they’d—the GDF have taken over my station, taken it offline. My brothers weren’t allowed to see me. A lot happened in Zurich and I probably shouldn’t talk about it, but it went wrong. Really wrong, I think I was nearly killed. The official story was that I had some sort of cardiac event, but…forget that. Sorry, I’m sorry, I’ve gotten off track. We’ve had to cease operations and—”

Now it’s Cassidy’s turn to interrupt, and her eyes are bright, bloodthirsty, and her voice betrays her excitement at the tantalizing suggestion of a story. “Mr. Tracy, what are you trying to tell me?”

“I don’t know what happened to me. But it’s not what everybody says.”

“Why contact me?" There's a hesitant pause, as though she hates to turn a story of this calibre away. “Have you contacted Lady Penelope? I know she’s a friend of your family’s, and she’s very—”

John cuts her off. “Penelope’s a very old friend. If this is as bad as it could be, I don’t want her involved, she could lose too much. And, well, honestly—beyond that, I’m not sure I can trust her to—to take this seriously. We last spoke in London, and I think she thinks I’m paranoid. Maybe I can’t trust her.” John pauses, deliberately. “I know you’re more than just a talk show host. You’ve won awards for journalism, I know I can trust you to see that this matters.”

Cassidy agrees hastily, “Of course, of course I do. I do believe you, John. I don’t think you’re paranoid, but Lady Penelope—”

“I want to know the truth. I want everyone to know the truth. International Rescue has always had a relationship with the GDF, as far back as when our father was in charge, but—after this…after whatever happened to me. What if it isn’t what we thought it was? We inherited these contacts from our father, but there’s a lot he never got to tell us, and a lot we never knew. But…If this could happen to me—I don’t know if my family’s safe, either.”

There’s a very subtle hint, a tiny suggestion in what John’s just said. And Catherine’s a very, very smart woman.

Cassidy’s no longer looking at John. Her gaze has started to roam around, to drift briskly through text and information of her own. It’s almost an afterthought when she asks, “May I record this call?”

John hesitates. “I would rather you didn’t,” he hazards, and glances at the door again. “I might be doing something really stupid. I maybe shouldn’t…”

The anxiety must tell in his voice, because Cassidy looks up at him, sharp and wary. “John,” she starts, “are _you_ safe?”

And there it is. There’s that dark glimmer of suspicion, the thing John’s been gently nudging Catherine towards. Because what if the GDF were responsible for the introduction of the disease that had nearly killed him? All right, so John knows they aren’t, because the Hood’s already claimed that title. But Catherine Cassidy doesn’t, and the suggestion is just too tempting. What _if_ they’d had him shut up, isolated in one of their facilities, and what if a man disguised as a GDF officer had nearly choked him to death in a damp, dark basement. So he’s silent for a long stretch of time, and then appropriately furtive when he answers. “I don’t know. I need you to promise you’ll give me some time before you do anything with what I’ve told you, just so I can—can get somewhere that _is_ safe. It’s just, I wanted to—I wasn’t sure if I was going to get the chance to tell anyone. Just, if there are answers, maybe you know how to find them. I don’t, this isn’t my world.”

This is very, very much Catherine Cassidy’s world, and John knows it. Catherine’s hologram chews her lower lip and her eyes are concerned, sympathetic. But she’s brisk, businesslike when she continues. “My caller ID has you using a public phone in—San Jose, in California. John? Can you get to a private line? Call me back as soon as you can, and I’ll start setting up the necessary contacts to do some research. We’ll work this out together. You need to find a secure line and call me back.”

“I’ll try.” He won’t. John plans to disappear and let Catherine Cassidy make the worst of it. To hell with the GDF. They deserve whatever he’s sent their way. “Thank you.”

John doesn’t believe in karma or tempting fate. He doesn’t believe in any sense of cosmic irony, because as far as the myriad forms of cosmic radiation are considered, irony is not quantifiable.

Except the two GDF officers who’ve walked in the door with a chime of bells above their heads—they are very quantifiable. John’s pretty sure the GDF aren’t actually after him. But his heart’s started to hammer beneath his ribs and he’s aware that he’s frozen, staring out the small window in the booth. Probably the pair of them is just here for lunch, as they approach the counter and begin to chat with the proprietor. Probably that’s all it is.

“John?” Cassidy prompts. “John, what’s the matter?”

“I have to go,” he answers, and snatches away the time card from its slot, closes the call and darkens the booth. Let her think whatever she wants about the way he cut her off. Hopefully she thinks the worst thing possible.

John pus it out of his head and squelches down the fluttery sensation of panic rising in his chest. He puts a hand on the door of the holobooth, and pushes it slowly open. Then he slips out of the booth, careful not to make too much noise, and walks slowly down the hallway towards the back door.

One of the GDF officers happens to look up at the sound of the door opening, but before it’s even closed behind him, John’s broken into a flat sprint down another back alley, making for the nearest major street, somewhere he can hail a cab and get the hell out of dodge.


	13. could’ve hit him hard enough to kill him

It takes a change of clothes, a third alter ego, and three and a half hours of driving a sleek, low-slung rental car down the I-5 South before John starts to think he’s probably shaken off anyone who might’ve been chasing him. If anyone’s looking for John Tracy, he’s not John Tracy any longer. The name on the copy of the contract he’d signed to put him behind the wheel of a little dark blue Corvette is _Justin Graham Townsend_.

Mr. Townsend is the owner of a moderately successful tech startup in Silicon Valley, and he’s angelic, the very picture of innocence, in a white cotton suit with blue chambray beneath it. He’s got a canvas and leather shoulder bag. Shoes, no socks. Pocket square, no tie. A glossy pebble watch and an incongruent bandage, wrapping up a broken thumb. Business casual, a little bit freewheeling, as befits the under-thirty owner of a moderately successful tech startup.

Mr. Townsend broke his hand playing racquetball. He’d lamented the fact to the same salesperson who’d helped him into the jacket of the suit he’d chosen. He’d had to come straight from the hospital to pick up a change of clothes on his way out of town. Important business in Vegas.

Mr. Townsend has his life together, and it’s easier for John to tell himself stories about his third alter ego in the space of twenty-four hours than it is to focus on his own reality.

No one is chasing Mr. Townsend.

Probably no one’s chasing John, either, but that hadn’t stopped him from breaking cover like a startled rabbit and bolting across the city in a paranoid fit of panic.

In his desperate, sudden flight across San Jose—in the same downtown clothier where he’d pulled a slim-fitting suit off the rack and left looking considerably more put together than he’d entered—John’s acquired a basic digital wallet. It’s a slice of stainless steel the size of a credit card, smooth and featureless. It’s encoded with securely encrypted digital copies of any identification documents he might require, as well as a newly approved suite of credit cards, or lines of credit, anyway. All platinum and titanium and ironclad, impenetrable black.

The nondescript little card is an identity unto itself. Blank when he’d first gotten it, but an artifact that held an entire life once EOS had gotten done, and she’d gotten done in the space of time it had taken to pay cash for the thing.

So far EOS has been invaluable. Really, John isn’t sure he’d be able to do this without her, because she’s just handled all the niggling technical details—like the fact that John hadn’t actually been carrying any ID. This is mostly a side-effect of having more or less been kidnapped.

So EOS had composited one digitally, from birth certificate through to driver’s license, given him the history of a San Jose native, complete with a high school and a place of employment and a home address. Then she’d grafted him onto the family tree of a collection of Townsends with their roots two states over. Once she’d given John the relevant details, helpfully pinned and prevalent in the corner of his vision, John had rented a gorgeous little sports car for one Justin Graham Townsend.

This was not his first choice, but EOS had decided that it’s Mr. Townsend’s birthday, and he’d been surprised and appropriately grateful when the rental agent had bumped him up a class, from a regular sedan up to a little luxury sports car.

The Corvette isn’t as smart as EOS is. But it’s still _damn_ smart and about ninety percent autonomous. The degree to which John’s actually driving the thing is nominal. This is fortunate, largely because John hasn’t actually been behind the wheel of a car in nearly five years. The steering wheel beneath his hands makes its own minute adjustments, the cruise control devours the asphalt of the interstate at a steady 75mph. The windshield dims appropriately to compensate for the light of the setting sun, and embedded holographs provide a clear overlay of the road ahead, of the speed limit, of upcoming rest-stops and landmarks.

The sensation in his right hand is mostly swallowed by dull, throbbing pain, but the world around him is still alive with magnetic fields. The steering wheel beneath his palms is solid, but his fingertips feel the resonance of the car’s electric engine. He can sense the fields around the radio and the watch on his wrist as his hand passes over it, pushes the cuff of his jacket up to check the time, as sunset cedes to dusk and he finds himself stifling a yawn, his thoughts drifting and latching on to nothing in particular, until he finds himself thinking about the one and a half tons of steel between him and the highway.

“If this car hit someone,” he asks aloud, to the little comm console in the dashboard that EOS has taken over, “who would be responsible?”

There’s a small camera aperture that’s been following his face, but before now he and EOS have made nothing but small talk over the audio system and filled a large portion of the drive listening to the “New World Symphony,” followed by “Peter and the Wolf.” The question of whether or not an artificial intelligence can enjoy a symphony would probably have been a better question to ask, but John’s let himself think too much about the Hood and the GDF and the world at large, and he’s slipped into a rather dark, broody sort of mood.

EOS answer is prompt, well-researched, and almost certainly technically correct. “There aren’t that many examples. Autonomous vehicular accidents are vanishingly rare. The legal cases that set precedent tend to find that it’s usually a case of human error, of an override enacted when it shouldn’t have been, as in the case of a potential crash. In the cases where the fault is found to be with the vehicle itself, it’s generally a case of a flawed interaction between the car and its surroundings, or with the other vehicle in question. Fault is then usually assigned to the manufacturer.”

“If you killed someone, would it be my fault?”

“No.”

“I made you. I’m why you exist.”

“The legal system at large is not in the habit of blaming butterflies for hurricanes.” There’s a pause. “Are you afraid I might kill somebody?”

John shakes his head, despite the empirical fact that she’d nearly killed _him_. But then, he’d had his hand over the button that would’ve done the same to her, and he’s always considered them equals in that regard. “No. Not really, no, I was just—thinking. About being responsible for you. Am I the butterfly in this scenario?”

“Butterflies are just as complicated as hurricanes, but it doesn’t make sense to compare the two. I’ve been responsible for myself for longer than you have been. Is _your_ progenitor responsible if _you_ kill someone?”

Now _that’s_ a complicated question. To what degree Jeff Tracy is responsible for John’s existence, in both a general and a specific sense—there are reasons John’s very deliberately avoided thinking about his dad. “I don’t know. Maybe. Maybe a little. I don’t know if he raised me to be the sort of person who _could_ kill someone.” He laughs, humorless. “I’ve done a lot I couldn’t have imagined doing, though, so who’s to say?”

There’s another silence, nothing but the hum of the wheels on the road beneath the car. It’s dark and John’s tired, and he doesn’t want to send his brain any further down the dark, winding path that leads to thoughts of his father.

“You broke your hand on a man’s face for my sake.” EOS breaks the silence, and there’s a thicket in the middle of his thought that John’s blundered right into. Her voice is always rendered high and childlike, makes the point that follows sound more innocent than it is. “You might have killed him, then. Would that have been my fault?”

“No.” John’s spine has stiffened against the smooth leather of the seat behind him and his hands have tightened against the steering wheel. The car helpfully engages heated seats and offers a selection of new-age jazz to help with tension. “There was more to it than that,” he answers, though it’s no defense. He’d surprised himself as much as anybody else, breaking his hand on the Hood’s face. It had been impulse and vengeance and a vindictive thrill of adrenaline and a deep-seated hatred for a man who’d tried to control him. It hadn’t been smart. “It was stupid and I shouldn’t have done it—”

“Because you could have killed him?”

“Well, no, because I broke my hand and it hurts like the damn devil.” John hesitates. “I don’t think I could’ve hit him hard enough to kill him.”

She persists, “Would you have killed him?”

“I don’t know.”

“Would you think less of me if I would have killed him, if I’d had the means? If it had been a question of your life and my existence?”

John just shakes his head and regrets asking. “No. I don’t know. I think it’s too circumstantial to know. I don’t want to kill anyone. I don’t want you to be put in the position where you’d ever feel you have to kill anyone. Forget I asked. I’m sorry.”

“I didn’t mean to upset you.”

“You didn’t. Haven’t. It’s fine. I’m just thinking too much. It’s just been…been a lot. Long day.” It’s been more than he’s been able to tell her. It’s been the longest continuous stretch of his life since his father was supposed to have died. The stretch of time that’s led to the discovery that his father may still be alive feels the same way.

“We’ll be stopping at the next motel,” EOS informs him, and the route mapped by the car changes accordingly, a mile counter ticking down to his arrival at a 2.4 star motel, between a gas station and a fried chicken joint. “You’re going to take your scheduled course of antibiotics and pain medication and then you’re going to sleep.”

“I don’t want to stop,” John objects. “We’re halfway to Vegas, we can—”

“What if you fall asleep at the wheel and the car kills someone? Is it my fault then?”

There are things about himself that John had forgotten, before EOS came along. He’d forgotten that he’d written a self-evolving computer program, for a start, but beyond that. It’s almost strange how she embodies parts of him from a time long past, a certain flippancy, a certain streak of dark humor. She reminds him of a younger version of himself. Before IR, before he’d had to become the sort of person with the answers to questions of life and death. Before the flippancy had been worn away by professionalism, and the streak of dark humor had gained painful edges, places where it cut at the reality of his day-to-day and didn’t seem so funny anymore.

But his day-to-day has become a minute-to-minute, and he’s lost control of his life, lost the reassuring order it had had before she’d made herself part of his world. So John laughs, the way she’s the only one who can get him to laugh, the only person he’s known in a long time who makes him feel real and genuine again. “Are you my conscience, now?”

“I’m capable of producing a perfectly optimized logical and moral choice within a nanosecond, and I would have told you not to punch the Hood in the face, if I’d known you were going to do it. So I can be, if you want.”

“I’ll keep it in mind.” Another yawn sneaks up on him, swallows the sentiment, and beneath his hands the steering wheel starts to suggest that he make a lane change, to take the next exit to the rest stop with the motel. “God, I _am_ tired. That almost sounds like a good idea. Do you want to be the butterfly or the hurricane?”

“You’ve had a very long day if you think there’s even the remotest chance you’re a hurricane. You are a damp and pathetic little butterfly. Go dry your wings off.”

John nods and already the idea of crawling into bed is starting to sound more and more appealing, even if it’s a bed that’s only worth 2.4 stars. There’s one more thing he needs to do, that second call he needs to make.

“If I key in a number, can you dial it from the car and then wipe the call data afterward?”

“Of course.”

“Okay. Do you have the resources to secure and encrypt it?”

This is more a question of the sort of software that’s available aboard a rented Corvette than it is a question of her ability. “They’re rudimentary, but I can make sure there are no external connections made during the course of the call.”

John nods and his fingers are already dialing, made slow and a little awkward by the weight of the brace, and then lingering for a moment on the send button. He’s had the number for a while. He’s been waiting for the reason to call it, but now that the time has come, John can’t help a slight, vague sense of anxiety. It’s a call to someone he knows but has never actually met.

Nothing for it. He thumbs the send button and the car pulls into the parking lot of an empty-looking motel parking lot. It rings as John parks and sags in his seat, tugs the seatbelt off and gently massages the place where it’s pressed a little too hard against his chest.

The phone is picked up and a very brusque, very English voice answers. “How’s the weather in Darjeeling, petal?”

John wasn’t sure what to expect, but it wasn’t that. “Beg pardon?”

“Cinnamon prices up in Morocco, my friend?”

He’s on the back foot now and fumbling slightly. “Uh, hello? I’m sorry, I—”

“Is Queen Elisabeth needed in the Rose Garden, Mr. President?”

Probably John should’ve gotten some sleep before he decided to make this call, but the voice on the other end intervenes with a rather long-suffering and _extremely_ British sigh. “I must inquire, do you _have_ a countersign for me, or will I be required to proceed through the entire list?”

“Oh! Uh, sorry, your lordship. Sorry, it’s—I’m just tired.”

And then, gently, “Sod it all if you’ve forgotten, and we’ll get down to brass tacks, but do at least give it a try. For formality’s sake?”

“Yes, sir.”

“Countersign?”

“Heavenward.”

“Good evening, Mr. Tracy.”

“Good evening, Lord Creighton-Ward.”


	14. the still tender place above his heart

John dreams of the same thing he’s been dreaming of for weeks: that there’s a hurricane screaming below him, a roaring, yawning void, an eye staring upward, seeing him the way nothing else does.

He can’t move, can’t do anything but fall towards it, though it’s not the sort of falling that most people are afraid of. There’s no rush of wind in the void, no resistance of air, no chill of the upper atmosphere. It’s the pull of Earth’s gravity versus the inertia of freefall, locking him into a trajectory that he hasn’t chosen.

It’s a paradox—waking, John would kick himself for being exactly the sort of person who dreams in paradoxes—the faster he falls, the wider and deeper the eye of the hurricane opens beneath him, like the event horizon of a black hole. He’ll never hit the bottom. He’ll be pulled downward forever, drawn into a billion fragments of himself until he’s nothing at all and damned to be nothing forever.

It’s a bright flash of light that wakes him, the xenon headlights of a car sweeping across the parking lot outside the window he forgot to close, searing through his eyelids until he’s gasped himself awake.

The room is a mess of light and shadow, and outside there are voices that don’t belong to people who care about anyone who might be sleeping, and the slam of car doors, and loud, grating laughter. John aches and wishes he could stop aching, rubs at bleary blue eyes and shifts himself out from under the coarse motel sheets and too-thin motel blankets to pad across the room in bare feet and pull the blinds closed.

The air conditioner runs against the California heat, but it runs too cold and icy air pools on the floor, seems to pull against John’s skin as he flees back to bed, wide awake. It’s not quite warm enough, but he buries himself in the blankets anyway, tucks long legs up and sighs to himself.

He hasn’t got his HUD, his contacts are out and suspended in a clear solution in a case on the bedside. But the earpiece is there and John reaches for this, turns it on and slips it into his ear, the slender curve of a microphone angled down along the line of his cheekbone. “EOS?”

“You have had three hours and twenty-two minutes of sleep, and this is insufficient. You have an alarm set for 0600, and that is when you can get up.”

“I had a bad dream.” She’s the one who’s supposed to sound like a child, and he doesn’t know what he expects her to do with this information. He clears his throat and rubs his eyes and presses his face against a synthetic feather pillow. “Sorry.”

“Do you often have bad dreams?”

John shakes his head into the pillow and doesn’t want to remember that feeling of eternal free fall. “No. Not really. I don’t usually remember dreams. Just, this same one, again and again, since—since the hurricane. I keep dreaming about the hurricane.”

“Is it a nightmare or a night terror?”

This sounds clinical, diagnostic, and John imagines her on the motel’s rather spotty Wi-Fi, paging through data as relates to dreams. “Not a nightmare. Just a bad dream, it just—I wake up feeling—god, I don’t know. I don’t know if you can understand dreams. You don’t have dreams.”

“The concept isn’t difficult. If you don’t remember your dreams, is it the same as not having them at all?”

John doesn’t know. He shrugs beneath the blankets, the physical gestures he can’t help making, though he knows he’s unobserved. His voice runs away from him, somehow so starved for someone to talk to. “I don’t know. There’s not a lot to remember. It’s just the hurricane in the Gulf, and I can see the coast beneath it, and sometimes I think I can see my brothers in their ships, and I’m just falling. I just fall, that’s the only thing that happens. I wake up, and I feel…I wake up _feeling_. I don’t just come back around in neutral any longer, I wake up _badly_. I wake up and I feel hollowed out and emptied and tired and—I wish it would stop. I can’t stand feeling _pulled at_ and _god_ , I hate falling.”

“You’re not falling. You’re in bed in a motel in California, and you’re very safe. I have access to all security footage. I’ve started to expand my parameters and I’m pinging all nearby systems for any hint of pursuit. No one’s going to hurt you.”

“I know. I don’t know what I’m so afraid of. I just—” He pauses, sighs and then finishes lamely, “Feel bad.”

John misses Thunderbird 5 and the little cameras all over the station. He misses her approximation of body language, because surely in the space where her silence falls now, there would have been a little whirring nod of acknowledgment, a little spin of her lenses, focusing in his direction, LEDs all soft and sympathetic green. “I’m sorry, John.”

He shakes his head and rolls over, curls further in on himself. His hand, unbidden, goes to the still tender place above his heart, finds soft cotton bandages and tape. “Not your fault.”

Not good enough, for EOS. “Still. You need restful sleep. Perhaps it’s just the readjustment to gravity. Disordered sleep seems to be quite a common phenomenon among returning astronauts, the explanation is largely considered to be a process of adjustment to new physical sensations that have been absent for long periods of time.”

Oh.

John rolls over beneath the blankets, stares up at the ceiling for a long, quiet minute, trying not to think too hard about how obvious that answer is. Finally, hesitant and just a little bit hopeful, “Do you think that’s all it is? God. Jesus, that’d almost explain it, it feels like—like vertigo. Like that thing that happens in elevators sometimes. Ahh—you wouldn’t know about that. Am I dreaming about falling because I’m still not used to gravity?”

“I think it makes logical sense. You were unable to follow the usual protocols for acclimatization to Earth gravity, and beyond that you’ve been ill and under enormous stress. Bad dreams can be explained.”

The explanation is enough to make John’s limbs start to release some of their tension, make some of the anxious twists in his gut start to loosen—all the unpleasant twinges and triggers of his worries about his mind and its sanctity. “That helps. I don’t know how but, _god_ that helps. I don’t know what I’d do without you.”

“Struggle, probably.”

She’s making a joke, her sort of teasing and deprecating sense of humor, the same sort of thing he’d always used to banter right back at her, but she doesn’t know—can’t know—how close she hits to home.

“I’m sorry I’m such a mess.”

“Why do you think you’re a mess?”

There’s a lot John still hasn’t told her, but there’s probably a lot she’s figured out for herself, just from what he’s told other people, just from everything that’s happened. “A lot of reasons.”

It’s hard to read her mood without all the tiny little cues she’d learned to emulate aboard the station. In the back of John’s mind, he’s wondering about whether or not it might make sense to render an avatar for EOS, something he can see, something that gives her a bit more control over her expressions. “And what are they?”

John’s quiet for a long time, trying to decide if the way he feels is worth saying something about. Finally it slips out, unbidden. “I think—think I need you more than I used to. Before all this happened, before I got sick—things have changed and I’m not…” John swallows hard and thinks back to a conversation with Brains, a careful recommendation that he talk to someone about everything that had happened to him. This probably hadn’t been what he’d meant, but this is the first time John’s been able to open up to anyone. “I don’t know what I’m doing, it’s not getting any easier and I’m afraid I’ll—I’m afraid I’ll do something wrong, only _now_ it’ll cost us both. I don’t know if being with me is any better for you than going your own way would be. I…don’t want you to feel stuck with me. We’re past that. I _never_ wanted to—to trap you. You don’t owe me anything.”

EOS pauses and her tone gains a certain sort of gentleness. “From a reductive standpoint, I owe you everything.”

“Well, I don’t want you to. You don’t have to stay. You know that, right?”

She’s always had a defiant streak, and if she had the ability to laugh, especially with derision, John feels like she would have done so. Instead, she just lays down her own personal law. “I’ll do whatever I like and I’ll stay with you for as long as I want. I stayed in the first place because you asked me to. We’re partners and friends, and you’re not getting rid of me.”

“But—”

“You have four hours, twenty-three minutes of sleep to complete. You are expected to meet Lady Penelope in Las Vegas by 1800h tomorrow evening. Beyond that, you haven’t told me what your plans are, but I’ve given you the benefit of the doubt, and I assume you’re going to need me. I like to be needed. Don’t argue with me about this, because you won’t win.”

Running on three hours of sleep, she’s probably right about that. John closes his eyes and locks his arms around the pillow beneath his head. “Sorry.”

“Don’t be sorry. Go to sleep.”

“I’ll try.”

She doesn’t answer, but the earpiece in his ear begins to drone softly with the greyed out sounds of a low, hollow radio static. This is something that’s been effective since John was a baby, and it works just as well now, blankets his thoughts and softens their ragged edges. The digital clock beside the bed has had its display prudently dimmed into near invisibility to keep John from staring at it, but he notices for the first time that there’s a ring of white lights around the edges of the display. “EOS?”

“Talking isn’t sleeping.”

“No, I know. Just. Thanks. For listening. And for staying. I don’t really want you to go.”

“Sleep well, John.”

“Good night, EOS.”


	15. if the old frontier is gone

Life improves.

Sleep and painkillers have taken the edge off of the little collection of hurts John’s nursing. A warm, careful shower in a motel bathroom that’s not nearly as bad as it could be. Meticulous examination in the mirror and a comparison of his notes reveal that the state of his chest and collarbone are rapidly improving, all signs of potential infection diminished. He still applies anti-septic and downs antibiotics, but he’s no longer got the creeping fear of sepsis and blood poisoning crawling beneath his skin.

He doesn’t remember much of their midnight conversation, but EOS is chipper and kind and cheerful as they get out to the car, hit the road. There’s a brief detour through the nearby gas station for coffee and a banana and a bag of surprisingly robust little granola bites, and by the time they’re over the state line into Nevada, John’s actually grinning.

“Have you thought about expanded hardware?” he questions aloud, reaches over to turn up the volume on the car’s stereo. “There’s very little you can’t get in Vegas these days.”

This, in more ways than one, is something John’s banking on.

“I want something on par with your old suit-cam, I don’t like not having visuals. The internal antenna in this rig is passable for universal connection, but I want better reception and to be able to boost my own signal at need. I’d like a secondary antenna, if possible. You need a new GPS locator, I can’t keep approximating your location off what I can triangulate from Wi-Fi. I’m starting to work on coding better general interfaces for your HUD, but you need better integration with your haptic interface. I want you to get a hold of better biometric scanners. That horrid little pebble thing won’t suffice, where on Earth did you get it?”

“Leave Pinocchio alone, he’s very stylish.”

“Pinocchio has the processing power of a waterlogged calculator and I deserve better peripherals.”

“You’re kind of a brat,” he comments, teasing. He grins and the fingers of his good hand drum on the steering wheel as the speed limit changes from seventy-five to eighty. The highway is largely empty before him, the desert painted in shades of gradated gold. The horizon rises into the foothills of the mountains that carve across the Mojave. Overhead, the sky is mercilessly cloudless, deep, cerulean blue. This isn’t so bad. “I’ll see what I can do. I might need to cobble together my own hardware. I had a prototype back on the island, but—”

“When are we going back to the island?”

The drumming of John’s thumbs against the steering wheel stops, his fingers grip a bit harder, twinging against the pressure. His jaw tightens slightly, his smile fades. “We’re not.”

“Why not?”

John fixes his eyes on the road, on the long, dark ribbon stretching straight ahead towards the low, rolling mountains at the terminus of the desert highway. “There’s something I need to do, and I need to ask you if you’ll help me.”

“Of course I will.”

“I haven’t even told you what it is yet.”

“I like to have projects.”

John laughs, but it snags on a moment of melancholy, a memory of staring at the ceiling and wondering what he’d do with EOS. He hesitates for a moment and then, sobering, “I meant what I said last night. You don’t have to stay with me. I can’t promise—without TB5, I don’t have the resources I used to, and I couldn’t keep you safe then and there. You might be better off if you weren’t tethered to me.”

The Corvette’s windshield wipers flick once, a vaguely irritated sort of gesture. “I’d forgotten how tedious you can be.”

John would be lying to himself if it wasn’t reassuring to have her turn him down again and he glances at the camera lens of the dashboard’s comm console, grins at her again. The sky above is bright and cloudless again after his momentary shadow of doubt. ”Let me know if my humanity starts to bore you.”

“You’ll be the first to know.”

* * *

You can get anything in Vegas.

You can especially get anything in Vegas with a near infinite line of falsified credit and a supercomputer whispering hardware specs in your ear.

Vegas isn’t what it was. Water has always been a dwindling resource in the Southwest, and it’s dwindled away to near nothing. Over the years the city had sprawled out around the strip, but what there once was has drawn inward. The suburbs dried up and emptied with the water, and what remains is a line of tall buildings, hotels and casinos, running tight through the center of the city, the Las Vegas strip. Rising like a ridge of keratin over faded scar tissue, a city that had lived only a century and a half before dwindling and diminishing down to nothing

Or, next to nothing, anyway. The sort of money that built Las Vegas is tenacious and clever and ruggedly American. If the old frontier is gone, then it had just been necessary to latch on to a new one.

The sort of money that used to run through the city has dried up too, and left behind towers and pyramids and castles, hollow and empty. These aren’t what they once were, either. Now they’re something new.

So the reasons you can get anything in Las Vegas aren’t the reasons of wealth and indulgence and excess. Now, they’re reasons of commerce and industry and dogged determination, a need to cling to relevance.

John’s standing in the middle of a warehouse crammed to the brim with the sort of computer hardware that makes him _giddy_ , and he still has six hours to kill before he’s due to meet Lady Penelope.

John hadn’t expected to—not _really_ —but he finds likes Vegas. The Strip of old, in its heyday, had been a manic place of light and colour and sound, a press of bodies and heat. Now it’s near-deserted, and the broad avenue is perfect for the sort of zippy little vehicles that can move from one end of it to the other hauling cargo and supplies, driven by people who are intensely busy. Everything is clean and tidy and orderly, and ambling out of the cavernous electronics store, John’s growing gradually more enamored with what remains of the once sinful city.

An old tram line still runs the length of Las Vegas Boulevard, and once he’s finished shopping, he catches a ride to the nearest restaurant and eats his lunch in a quiet corner, while EOS starts to make plans for all the hardware he’s picked up. It’s nice just to listen to her talking, to hear her excitement and to see her drawing up plans and writing code, lines of colour flowing across his vision as she begins to make accommodations to program an interface for a secondary antenna, an external display to echo John’s old IR wrist comm, and calibrating new sensors to help improve interaction with the magnets embedded in John’s fingertips.

It’s all tiny, all born from an industry that demands smallness in every accoutrement. The hardware that he’ll use to put together another wrist comm is the largest. Even still in its packaging, this only takes up a single pocket in John’s bag, along with the tiny antenna and a new sensor designed to track and transmit the movement of electromagnets. It all still needs to be wired in, of course. That’s going to be the interesting part.

For all that Vegas has changed, cleaned up its act and become a respectable center of society, the city’s sordid underside still seems to cling to the shadows. Not a block over from the reclaimed and revitalized Las Vegas strip, casinos and strip clubs and tattoo parlors start to pop up and sirens sound distantly. After two hours spent spending a ridiculous amount of money on highly specialized electronics, John should probably be a little more wary about wandering over to the wrong side of the tracks in a pristine white suit, with a shoulder bag full of his newly acquired gear. He sticks out like a sore thumb. But he’s also running a little high on adrenaline, and he feels better and luckier than he has in ages. Something about the high desert air, or just the ghost of a city built by gamblers possessing him just a little bit.

EOS is carefully checking reviews and ratings, cross-referencing health code violations, and she’s the one who picks out an unassuming little shop. What John wants isn’t uncommon, necessarily, and it results in a surprisingly warm reception from a collection of people who probably have as much ink between them as John put down in his thesis. But they’re all friendly, businesslike, polite. John’s given a glass of water and seated across from an artist at a desk and queried about what he’s looking for. The place is clean and neat and if the walls are covered with digital pictures of various bits of painted anatomy, well, the work is actually fairly impressive. John finds himself distantly reminded of Virgil for some inexplicable reason.

So it turns out there’s nothing _wrong_ with the wrong side of the tracks, it’s just home to people who are a bit rougher around the edges, trying to scratch out a living in what remains of a city that was once far friendlier to the freaks on the fringes.

Initially John’s only interested in replacing the GPS implant he’d had removed. But it turns out that there’s an undercurrent of biohackery that runs through the body modification community, and pretty soon his newly acquired haul has been rummaged through, spread out on the counter, and examined in context. A lot of surprisingly clever people have surprisingly clever suggestions. John mentions the magnets in his fingertips offhandedly, and his hands are examined by a woman with a mohawk, and there’s irritation and outrage at the butchery of such gorgeous hands. He’s offered tattoos on his palms that map the lines of filament through his hands and suggestions that the magnets in John’s fingers can be disabled without removal by simply disengaging the batteries in his wrists. It’s almost tempting, but John declines.

By the time he’s finished, the GPS implant is the least that’s been done. A fresh little tag has been dropped into a slit in the skin behind his other ear, the skin numbed with a little bit of lidocaine, and a neat little stitch of bio-polymer closes it up. The tiny wireless antenna he’d procured as a secondary transmitter for EOS is sheathed in bio-compatible plastic and pierced twice through the upper ridge of cartilage in his left ear, industrial and tipped with anodized titanium spheres. The tiny sensor bar for his HUD has been given a similar treatment and pierced through the bridge of his nose. It all stings and smarts, but being at least somewhat self-inflicted, less so than the damage that’s been done without his consent.

And finally, though he’s well aware it’s probably a bad idea—and that on the run as he is, the less he has to be identified by the better—John returns to the woman with the mohawk. Not his hands, they’ve got scars enough, but he opens his shirt and displays the place where he’s had the pacemaker installed. Then, on a borrowed tablet, he pulls up the logo for International Rescue and asks if she could find room for it in the hollow below his collarbone.

With a woman leaning over his chest and the quiet, whining hum of a tattoo gun keeping him intently focused, a set of coordinates had flashed up in his field of view, EOS displaying a message and the time. The Lady Penelope expects him.

When John leaves, there’s another fresh bandage on his chest, and beneath it in subtle white ink, something to remind him of who he is and where he comes from. The sun is setting above the Strip as John gets back to his rented car and drives out towards the desert again.


	16. a rare gesture for all their long friendship

“John Glenn Tracy. What in heaven’s name have you done to your _face_?”

FAB1 is parked at the edge of what used to be Lake Mead, a high ridge overlooking the lake bed. It’s not Lake Mead any longer, just like Vegas isn’t really Vegas. The shape of it is the same, but what once was there is long since gone, empty and barren.

Hers is the first friendly face John’s seen since he left Tracy Island, and she looks utterly appalled. John opens the door of his car and unfolds long limbs from where they’ve been, a little too close to the ground, for the last hour’s worth of driving. Lady Penelope’s expression is shaded by a parasol, helpfully held up by Parker against the late afternoon sun.

Penelope steps out from the shadow of the parasol and waves it away when Parker follows her. There are been a pair of sunglasses shading her blue eyes, and she removes these, the criticism in her eyes covering what might be mild alarm. “My _god_ , John. It’s barely been twenty-four hours, what on Earth have you done to yourself? Is your _hand_ broken?”

“You’re meant to keep your thumb on the outside, Master John,” Parker assesses, and demonstrates a balled-up fist, firm and solid.

“Thank you,” John answers, with as much dignity as he can muster, “I’ve been told.”

Parker, at least, is beaming from ear to ear, a rather friendlier face.

“Quite all right otherwise, Master John?” he inquires, and gestures with a gloved hand to his own beakish nose. “Cor blimey, if you don’t send me right back to me own troubled youth, that sort of hardware. I quite like it. Suits you.”

John shrugs, hyper-conscious of the two new piercings, the sting of the new tattoo, and how _little_ they suit him, really. It had, admittedly, been a little impulsive. It had been a little bit the heady rush of an assumed identity. It had been how comfortable the strangers in the tattoo parlour had seemed in their own skins, bedecked as they were in ink and metal of their own choosing. On the one hand he’d told himself it was just practical—a sensible, reasonable way to hide his hardware in plain sight. On the other it had just been—John’s not sure. It had just been _necessary_. He’s not sure he would know how to explain that, so he deflects the comment. “They’re just hardware peripherals. I just needed somewhere to keep a backup antenna, a few sensors.”

Penelope frowns and her gaze is critical, traveling up and down. “It’s distinctive. Really, John, it should be self-evident that the aim is _not_ to give anyone anything to remember you by.”

“I’ve got that covered,” John answers, and he does. EOS is all he needs, really, as far as a false identity goes. She’s already blurred his face in every piece of security footage that’s caught him. She’s already blotted out every trace of the digital paper trail he’s left in his wake, from the rental car to the motel stay to the electronics store to the tattoo parlor. Justin Townsend is already a ghost, and John Tracy has nothing to worry about. “Is anyone looking for me?”

“You mean besides your terrified family, of course.”

John blinks at her and there’s a sudden creeping guilt playing up his spine. “You mean you haven’t told them anything? I mean, they—they have to know I’m okay, though. Right? You can’t mean they don’t know _anything_?”

Penelope’s in a vaguely impatient mood and she sighs, exasperated. “No, John. You left Alan alone in a hotel room until he got panicky and called the island. Your GPS tag was found in the back of a garbage truck, clearly you’d gotten rid of it. None of your brothers know if you left or if you’ve been kidnapped, but they’re all terrified either way.”

Not for the first time, John needs to put up a wall between himself and the way his brothers must feel. He’s long practiced at it, detachment, but it’s a little harder when it’s something he’s done. Is doing. He’s still fumbling with mental bricks and mortar when his voice escapes him, stricken and guilty. “Jesus. I never meant—”

“They think I’m looking for you. Kayo, too. I mean that Kayo’s looking, not that I’m looking for Kayo. I know precisely where Kayo is.”

“When you first—back in London, when you first brought this up, and I thought—I thought you’d have something to tell them.” John swallows, hard, mentally starts to smooth over the chinks and gaps in the cinder block barrier that walls off his empathy.

“Plausible deniability, darling. If I start lying about where you are, it’s just more pieces that can fall apart. Beyond seeing you off for the last place I heard from your father, I’m really best served not to know where you are. _I_ can’t disappear to find Jeff Tracy, so you’re going to have to.”

Penelope is the coolest thing for miles around, in a softly flowered sundress, teased slightly by the breeze. She’s oh so delicately English, with her perfect hair and a teacup pug in her arms, but she’s still a force to be reckoned with, and John hasn’t ever really reckoned with her. She’s utterly unperturbed by anything she’s done so far, and John has to remind himself that she doesn’t work for International Rescue—hasn’t ever worked for International Rescue. She works for his father.

Standing on the cliff side in the late summer heat of the Mojave Desert, John feels his father’s shadow fall over him, and shudders away from the thought. “Do you think he’s still alive? Do you think I _can_ find him?”

“You asked me that in London. I told you I don’t know.”

Parker clears his throat, and once again, surprisingly, he’s the more sympathetic of the partnership, the softer touch. “With respect, milady, that’s not what Master John asked you.”

And it’s just the tip of the iceberg as far as what he wants to know, so he presses on with more questions, the sorts of things that have kept him up nights ever since Lady Penelope pulled him over the threshold of her biggest secret. “Why’s he hiding? Why— _how_ —would he fake his death? It doesn’t make any _sense_ , Penny, I’ve been tearing my brain apart trying to come up with a reason why he’d—”

“You can’t know,” Penelope cuts him off, shifting Sherbet in her arms as he whines and gives a squeaking little yip. “If you find him, then he’s the one who’ll tell you. If you don’t find him, then you can’t ever know, it’s as simple as that.”

That’s possibly the most complicated proposition John’s ever heard in his life, and he shakes his head, starts to protest, “But, Penelope—”

“Do you think your father would orphan his children _lightly_ , John? Everything in the world that he gave up, do you think the reasons for that could possibly be simple? Do you honestly think it’s something you could puzzle out in your head, lying awake at night?” Her voice is hard, cold. John can’t quite get over how stern she sounds, how serious. He’s always considered Penelope a good friend. He’s realizing now that there’s a side of her he’s never seen before. “What he’s done, he’s done to protect your family, and you’re going to have to do the same. They can’t know where you are, and you mustn’t try to reach out to them.”

John’s always been one to isolate himself. He’s spent the past three years physically separated from his family, but he’d still at least _spoken_ to them every day. Some days probably more than they’d spoken to each other. It’s not disconnection John values, just _distance_. The idea of dropping out of the world, untethered, with his brothers—and Kayo and Grandma and Brains—all unaware what’s even happened to him—it’s starting to seem like it might be a _bad_ idea. With doubt seeping into his thoughts, haltingly, John has to ask, “Am I…have…have I made a mistake, Penny? Do you really think I can do this?”

“Well, _I_ can’t. Honestly, John, you’re the best hope I’ve had in a year.” Penelope sighs and shakes her head. She softens slightly, sets Sherbet down on the ground to totter around and chase eddies of dust along the rocky cliff side. Parker ambles along after the little dog, seems to know when Penelope wants a private moment. He’s out of earshot before she seems to decide what to say. Her arms cross, she rubs her hands up and down bare skin beneath the fluttering sleeves of her dress. Maybe John’s not imagining the sudden chill in the air. “I don’t know if you’ll find him, John. I dearly hope you do. This was easier, at the beginning. It was never meant to go on this long. This last year has been—I’ve wanted nothing more than to tell your family the truth, even if the truth _now_ is just—just what you thought it was in the beginning. I hope he’s somewhere well and safe. I only hope you can forgive me for how long I’ve had to lie.”

This strikes an unexpected chord and John’s reminded of a conversation he wasn’t part of, something that wouldn’t have been discussed if he’d been sat at the same table as Virgil and Gordon. Everyone knows Penelope’s a liar. Somehow they all manage to love her anyway. “If it’s not your lie, does it really make you a liar?”

Penelope shrugs her slender shoulders and holds out an imploring hand. They’ve been friends for long enough that John knows to take it. Her fingers are small and cool against his and she squeezes briefly. “Has that been bothering you?” she questions.

John attempts a half-hearted grin. “It’s on the list.”

“Let me know if you work it out,” she says softly, smiling a little in response, though it’s sad and she pulls her hand away, folds her arms in again. “It’s bothered me for a tremendously long time now.”

These are the sorts of moments John’s never been great with. The sorts of silences that fall after serious conversations, the sort that make him glad of distance. Usually he misses the transition between solemnity and awkwardness, usually he drops his gaze and finds something intensely interesting on the ground. There’s a rather nicely shaped chunk of rock at the toe of his shoe, probably that’s worth looking at.

``

» Give her a hug.

``

John blinks at that. He doesn’t actually have a means of replying, his earpiece out and in his pocket. He glances up at Penny, looking out over the lake bed.

``

» Have you hugged her yet? A hug is a universally human gesture of support and affection and is socially acceptable to exchange between friends in moments of high emotion.

``

As though he’s any good at this, John takes a hesitant step forward and puts a hand on her shoulder. Penelope, mercifully, is a far better student of body language than John is of demonstrative affection, and she takes the hint and steps the rest of the way into a brief, necessary embrace, a rare gesture for all their long friendship. Neither of them know how long he’ll be gone, nor is John sure if he’s up to the task she’s set for him. “You still haven’t said. If you think I can do this, if you think I’ll find him.”

Penelope sighs and leans back, but her hands remain, catch around his waist as she looks up, ever so slightly irked with him. “John Tracy. You’re the smartest person I know and you’ve still been stupid enough to embed a supercomputer in your chest. _Clearly_ there’s no stopping you once you’ve set your mind to something, and on that strength alone, you’re better suited to this than I am. Quite honestly, by this point _I_ deserve answers, to say nothing of you and your brothers.”

John supposes this is probably true, and Penny lets go, steps back, and turns to look out over the lake bed again.

Lake Mead is empty, but it’s only empty of water. In the absence of water, it’s been filled with the United States’ largest commercial spaceport. Out of the craggy, hollowed-out shell of the lake, in the shadow of the defunct Hoover Dam, rockets roar skyward every night. A tourist shuttle will leave in just three hours, and John will be on it, with yet another identity and a small digital dossier, everything Penelope knows about where his father’s been for the past three years.

His heart, of its own volition, picks up in something that might be excitement, rather than straight fear, for the first time in ages. There are things about him that have been true for a long time, things that EOS brings out, things that Lady Penelope knows. Things like the fact that he doesn’t know to keep his thumb out when he punches his family’s arch-nemesis, or that he hates to be chased. That he’s put a bar through his nose and pierced his ear in two places, and that he’s done it to get closer to his heart of hearts, that secret place where he keeps his might-be soulmate. John lacks the words for a lot of these things.

Still, there’s one thing that’s very, very easy to say, and he says it. “Well,” he starts, with a smile he can’t help and his eyes lighting up, “I _have_ always wanted to go to the Moon.”

**Author's Note:**

> Edited, polished, and updated as of 07/22/2016, gracious thanks to [ScribeOfRED](http://archiveofourown.org/users/scribeofred) for all her help and dedication <3


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